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PROBLEMS OF EDUCATIONAL 
READJUSTMENT 



BY 



DAVID SNEDDEN, Ph.D. 

Commissioner of Education, Massachusetts 




BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
(fflfoe Stibergibe pvt$0 Cambrib0e 



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COPYRIGHT, I913, BY DAVID SNEDDEN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



For permission to use in this volume papers that have 
previously been published as magazine articles, ac- 
knowledgment is made to the Atlantic Monthly, the 
Educational Review, Education, the School Review, 
Vocational Education, and the Journal of Educational 
Psychology. 



Cfcc Ribersibe $re&c 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



©CI.A350306 



PREFACE 

How shall education be made efficient? 
Undiscriminating critics have always con- 
demned the schools for their failure to pro- 
duce a higher type of men and women ; but 
now the large majority of educators are them- 
selves convinced that the traditional processes 
of training and instruction are far from rend- 
ering efficient educational service. In all direc- 
tions men and women, moved by the vision of 
a brighter future on earth, are striving to 
promote human well-being. Education is but 
one of the phases of this newer social economy. 
It, too, is certainly capable of being made 
more purposeful, more scientific, less blind in 
its methods, less doubtful as to its results. 

But educational processes can be improved 
only as particular phases or fields of education 
are singled out for consideration and construc- 
tive effort. It is probable, for example, that 
American primary education, judged by valid 



iv PREFACE 

standards, would be found to be far more 
efficient than that designed for young persons 
from twelve to fourteen years of age, or that 
designed for youths from fourteen to eighteen 
years of age. Again, careful analysis might 
show that the customary education of the high 
school is fairly effective for that minority who 
are qualified to pass to institutions of higher 
learning; while for the large majority, to 
whom it represents the final stage of system- 
atic cultural education, it may be of little 
actual service. The problem is one to be con- 
sidered as it touches particular groups of chil- 
dren or particular aims to be realized. 

In each of the following papers a particular 
educational problem is isolated for purposes 
of analysis and discussion. In each case the 
problem is one growing out of contemporary 
efforts to render education more effective by 
defining purposes or aims in a scientific man- 
ner, and to secure methods designed to achieve 
these purposes. 

There can be but little question that the 
most characteristic weakness of American edu- 



PREFACE v 

cation, as that concerns young persons from 
twelve to eighteen years of age, is to be found 
in its failure to formulate valid aims. Being 
guided by no sufficient aims, it is inevitable 
that the educational practice followed shall 
waver between the Scylla of custom-made (and 
therefore blind) method on the one hand, and 
the Charybdis of purely empirical device on 
the other. 

The following papers, with one exception, 
treat of but a few of the fundamental prob- 
lems growing out of the unscientific aims of 
contemporary education as that is designed 
for adolescents. What do we mean by culture, 
social efficiency, or liberal education? What 
is vocational education, and how is it related 
to general education? What are some broad 
principles of method by which profitable re- 
sults are to be achieved? These questions are 
at least implicit in the discussion of each topic 
presented. 

The papers have been written with a view 
to provoking further discussion of the ques- 
tions involved. If it be true that in the field 



vi PREFACE 

of general secondary education we have as 
yet few aims that are educationally serviceable 
or valid, then we must address ourselves to 
this field of study before we can either deter- 
mine subject-matter or elaborate right method. 
An illustration may serve to make this clear. 

If, for example, we ask the question as to 
why girls should, as a condition of graduat- 
ing from the ordinary high school course, be 
required to study algebra, we shall be given 
two sorts of replies, each based on certain con- 
ceptions of educational aim. The first answer 
will be to the effect that algebra is a neces- 
sary part of a secondary education, that it is 
prescribed for admission to college, etc. But 
if it be further asked why the subject is re- 
quired in secondary education or for admission 
to college, we receive the familiar replies that 
the study of algebra has peculiar merit as a 
means of " training the mind," " giving cul- 
ture," "leading to a comprehension of the 
universe," " serving as a foundation for voca- 
tional efficiency," etc. 

It is evident that no school subject can 



PREFACE vii 

rightly be regarded as an end in itself. But 
equally it should be clear that the vague and 
general ends stated above are as yet so inde- 
terminate and illusory as to serve little or no 
useful purpose in enabling us to determine, 
in the first place, whether algebra study should 
be required at all, and in the second, as to the 
methods to be followed and specific results to 
be sought in teaching it. 

Somewhere in the cultural, social, and voca- 
tional utilities of modern life are to be found 
the determining aims of education; and in 
large measure these must be analyzed and 
studied one by one. The educator must evolve 
a philosophy of the educative process as a 
whole ; but he must learn to seek his goal by 
successive steps and stages, each clearly pre- 
visioned in relation to the whole. 

D. S. 



CONTENTS 



I. New Education and Educational Read- 
justment 1 

II. The New Basis of Method 33 

III. What is Liberal Education? 65 

IV. Why Study History? 88 

V. The Practical Arts in Liberal Educa- 
tion 113 

VI. Differentiated Programs of Study for 

Older Children in Elementary Schools 130 

VII. The Opportunity of the Small High 

School 154 

Vm. Debatable Issues in Vocational Education 183 

IX. Problems in the Psychology of Voca- 
tional Education . . 211 

X. Centralized vs. Localized Administration 

of Public Education 233 

Index 261 



PROBLEMS OF EDUCATIONAL 
READJUSTMENT 



THE NEW EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL 
READJUSTMENT 

Is there a new education ? There certainly 
is a new education in the same sense that 
there is a new industrial order, a new practice 
of medicine, a new philanthropy. The new 
education, as yet but partially evolved, owes 
its origins, on the one hand, to the develop- 
ment of scientific knowledge, and on the 
other, to the spread of democratic ideals. Sci- 
ence has revolutionized agriculture, commerce, 
communication, and warfare; and it is now 
bringing in a new education. Strivings to- 
wards democracy, expressed in the newer 
social economy, have transformed government, 
religion, and social organization; the new ed- 



2 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ucation is in part the product of the same 
influences. 

What we call, for convenience, the new 
education is at present an exceedingly com- 
posite affair. In large part it is a matter of 
new ideals rather than of new practice. The 
breakdown of faith in older customs and doc- 
trines is always accompanied by a boundless 
disposition to launch new experiments and to 
form new parties or cults. While in some 
slight measure the new education may already 
have influenced social evolution, it is prima- 
rily the demands of contemporary civilization 
which are forcing readjustments in education. 
This new civilization is compelling education 
to define anew its purposes, to extend the 
range of its activities, and to improve upon 
its ancient methods. 

In education, as in many other forms of 
institutional life, the present is a period of 
acute transition. Education has hitherto rested 
upon a foundation of custom ; it must here- 
after rest upon a basis of scientific knowledge. ~ 
Its aims and practices have been in large 



THE NEW EDUCATION 3 

measure the slowly derived products of the 
method of " trial and success." A civilization, 
or any institution needful to civilized life, 
can develop only to a limited degree upon the 
basis of the " trial and success " method, the 
results of which are crystallized into custom- 
ary practice and dogma. Only up to a certain 
point in social evolution, is the " custom " basis 
efficient; beyond that, it is wasteful and re- 
tarding. 

Modern history presents many of the char- 
acteristics of periods of transition in the sev- 
eral forms of institutional life. The industrial 
processes of the eighteenth century rested 
everywhere on a basis of social habit; the 
modern transformation of industry, due to the 
application of scientific knowledge, has been a 
painful but a glorious process. The produc- 
tivity of human labor has undoubtedly been 
increased many fold thereby, but it is not clear 
that the accompanying social readjustments 
have been more than partially beneficent. 
Modern agriculture, with its adjunct of cheap 
transportation, differs, at its best, immeasur- 



4 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ably from the agriculture of even seventy-five 
years ago. But the transformation now going 
on here is even yet chaotic in many of its as- 
pects, and is attended still by the disappear- 
ance of cherished institutions which were 
themselves the slow outgrowth of the ancient 
customs of tillage and soil ownership. 

The " arts of healing " of our grandfathers, 
the product of ages of selective effort, have 
given way to the modern science of medicine. 
But people still cling to the dogmas and cures 
of the older medicine as to cherished heir- 
looms, and not all of the changes accompany- 
ing the development of the " new medicine " 
have been fortunate. In this transition from 
social habit to medical science, we have seen 
the conflicts of opinion, the destruction of 
old beliefs, the ineffective pretensions of prac- 
tices based upon half -tested science, and, in 
many cases, the same overtaxing of the powers 
of readjustment, which make all great social 
revolutions painful, and often productive also 
of skepticism and disorder. 

In education we are as yet nearer the be- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 5 

ginning than the end of a great period of 
transformation. <It is inevitable that this should 
be so because of the complex and obscure 
character of the sciences upon which, ulti- 
mately, all educational practice must rest. 
The physical sciences, which are to a great 
extent basal to industry, war, and communi- 
cation, were the first to reach a considerable 
stage of development ; while chemistry, and 
the biological sciences, which underlie medi- 
cine, and also agriculture, have now a long 
period of development behind them. But psy- 
chology and sociology, the contributions of 
which are fundamental to a science of edu- 
cation, are themselves as yet undeveloped and 
indefinite. 

But sufficient progress has been made in 
the evolution of the "new education" to con- 
vince nearly all careful students that the old 
order has already been largely outgrown. The 
demands of contemporary society for a more 
purposeful, a more comprehensive, and a more 
efficient system of preparing the young for 
adult life, are insistent and of increasing de- 



6 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

finiteness. Confidence in the dogmas and 
customary practices of the older education is 
steadily lessening. Forces outside the field of 
education altogether are compelling a variety 
of readjustments in its aims and methods. 
Among educators themselves the disposition 
grows to regard education as a suitable field 
for experimental effort and systematic inquiry. 
They are no less ready than the critics outside 
the profession to share in the deliberate chal- 
lenging of long established doctrines. 

A widespread development of the new edu- 
cation must prove a very difficult matter. 
Not only are scientific foundations in psychol- 
ogy and sociology as yet insufficiently devel- 
oped; experimentation along new lines of 
educational practice is beset with unusual 
handicaps of every description. The respon- 
sibilities of administering education are com- 
monly so great as to retard or even to prevent 
the growth of the scientific temper on the part 
of executive officers ; the public, while tolerant 
enough of new hobbies or "faith cures" in 
education, is hostile to experimental effort 



THE NEW EDUCATION 7 

as such ; while education as a field of human 
enterprise hardly attracts as yet the spirits 
that delight in exploration and settlement in 
new regions. 

The present period of transition in educa- 
tion, therefore, presents problems of readjust- 
ment which are especially difficult to deal 
with because many changes must be made at 
a time when our available knowledge is insuf- 
ficient to guide us aright. It has sometimes 
been found necessary in American railroading 
to build a new bridge, to take the place of 
an old, while traffic continued to move over 
the rails. If we can imagine such an under- 
taking imposed upon men who did not pos- 
sess, and could not at the time obtain access 
to, the organized knowledge that governs in 
bridgebuilding, we should then have a situa- 
tion somewhat analogous to that which pre- 
vails in contemporary public education in 
America when institutions dealing with nearly 
20,000,000 young persons, employing about 
500,000 public servants and expending annu- 
ally nearly $500,000,000, must, on the basis 



8 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

o£ little-tested knowledge, be transformed to 
meet the requirements of a new and complex 
social order. 

The conditions which give rise to the de- 
mand for a new education are not unlike those 
which are forcing transformations in religion, 
in government, in international relations, in 
the social side of industry, in the administra- 
tion of justice, and in the family relationship. 
Profounder insight, on the one hand, and 
greater sensitiveness to human deficiency, on 
the other, — these are the twin forces every- 
where operative in convincing men that human 
incapacity, suffering, and waste can be reduced, 
and life be made better through the more pur- 
poseful use of such scientific knowledge as 
every day becomes more accessible. 

However lacking we may still be in detailed 
knowledge as to how the demands upon the 
new education are to be met, the broad lines 
of the readjustments that will have to be made 
are now evident. The older education was a 
social agency having fairly well-defined aims, 
a limited adaptability, and fixed methods em- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 9 

pirically derived; and it had evolved an ad- 
ministrative organization suited to its scope 
and purposes. The new education will obviously 
have to possess far wider and more purposeful 
aims ; its range of adaptability will, of necessity, 
be immeasurably greater; its methods must 
rest on a scientific basis ; and its organization 
must become complex and flexible in order to 
produce an efficient combination of democratic 
control and technical direction. In each of these 
directions a wide range of problems is certain 
to be encountered, some of which are even now 
capable of being formulated and examined. 

The aims and scope of the new education must 
be defined in terms of social economy as that 
subject is coming to be conceived. The words 
"social economy" are now employed to de- 
scribe comprehensively the numerous studies 
and practices which deal consciously with the 
practical problems of reducing suffering and 
waste of life, and of promoting human well- 
being. Society, developing self-consciousness, 
and aided by various forms of available scien- 



10 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

tific knowledge, finds an enlarging field of 
opportunity for the promotion of human wel- 
fare by the application of tested knowledge 
to a great variety of social conditions and 
through many agencies. Prevention and cure 
of disease by concerted action, control of the 
conditions giving rise to crime and moral de- 
linquency, improvement of the conditions of 
labor, furtherance of the agencies making for 
culture, civic idealism, and economic efficiency 
— these are but a few of the phases of con- 
scious social action comprehended under the 
phrase "social economy/' 

All experience is proving conclusively that 
the best purposes of an efficient social econ- 
omy are to be realized through processes that 
are essentially educational — that is, by the 
conscious control of the formation of habits, 
of the development of ideals, and of the im- 
parting of knowledge during the immature 
period of the lives of those who are yet to 
carry the full responsibilities of citizenship. 
Education, then, is a phase, and a large phase, 
of social economy. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 11 

But this interpretation of education operates 
inevitably to modify in far-reaching ways the 
prevailing conceptions as to educational aims, 
and especially those aims which should govern 
in that educational agency called the school. 

For it now becomes clear that there are many 
agencies which, with more or less conscious- 
ness of purpose, are concerned in education. 
The home, the church, the workshop, and the 
playground are the most ancient of these; 
while the stage, the press, the club, and the 
library are also potent under modern condi- 
tions. But in America none of the foregoing 
is in any substantial degree under the direct 
control of that social agency which expresses 
the collective will of all, namely, the State. 
Each is private or corporate in character and 
subject to influences which may reduce or 
nullify its better educational possibilities. 

The public school is to-day the chief agency 
to which society must turn in its efforts to 
realize the more far-reaching aims of the 
newer education. It is socially expedient and 
necessary that all educational purposes which 



12 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

other agencies will not voluntarily assume 
shall be realized in and by the public school 
in some form ; and the extent to which this re- 
sponsibility shall be taken over by the schools 
must, apparently, increase steadily. 

If the home fails to give instruction in hy- 
giene essential to the requirements of whole- 
some and sanitary living, as these are now 
understood, then the school may be expected 
to assume this function. If the farm and the 
workshop cannot do what they once did in fit- 
ting young people to perform productive work 
efficiently, then schools under public support 
and control will certainly be created for this 
purpose. If the street and vacant lot prove 
ineffective or harmful as agencies for the edu- 
cation to be realized through play, then cor- 
responding facilities will be developed under 
the oversight of some form of public school. 
If, for certain groups, the church proves un- 
equal to the problems of education in higher 
forms of idealism, then sooner or later we shall 
find society requiring that the public schools 
shall discover ways of doing the needed work. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 13 

If press and stage prove, under private and 
commercial control, but sorry educational 
agencies, then it will be inevitable that a so- 
ciety, desirous of keeping pure the fountains 
of early insight and ideals, will demand that 
the public school discover ways of providing 
substitute or countervailing influences. 

The last half-century has witnessed in all 
civilized countries an enormous enlargement 
of the functions of the public school. Much 
of this has been opposed and misunderstood 
because the underlying conditions have not 
been fully comprehended or have failed to win 
ready acceptance. As the various sciences have 
developed, the importance of using the schools 
as means of diffusing the knowledge thus or- 
ganized has been slowly realized. As the desir- 
ability of giving all persons some acquaint- 
ance with art, literature, and history has 
asserted itself in conjunction with the shaping 
of the ideals of democratic society, the school 
has offered itself or has been drafted for this 
purpose. As the changing home finds itself 
less favorably placed to give varied and con- 



14 EDUCATIONAL EE ADJUSTMENT 

crete introductions to the vocational arts, the 
demand that the school assume this responsi- 
bility becomes insistent. 

What are the probable limits of this dele- 
gation of responsibility and function to the 
school ? That is one of the unsolved problems 
of modern social economy. But some phases of 
the situation are now intelligible. The school, 
from being a rival and competing educational 
force, must, in the new order, become a con- 
sciously complementary, and deliberately co- 
operating, agency. The school of the older 
organization often played at cross-purposes 
with the home; it disparaged the education 
to be found in the workshop devoted to pro- 
ductive activity; in recent years it often sep- 
arated itself sharply from the church ; and it 
ignored or antagonized such educational forces 
as playground, press, and stage. The school 
of the past doubtless found it necessary and 
desirable to take this position in order that it 
might, thus fortified by its exclusiveness, 
achieve its best results. 

But such a condition can no longer persist. 



THE NEW EDUCATION 15 

It is out of harmony with the prevailing con- 
ceptions and the requirements of an effective 
social economy. It is wasteful of human 
energy, and it nullifies the best of educational 
endeavors. It leads to no organic constructive 
policy. 

In the new education, the school must com- 
prehend its position and responsibilities as 
one of several educational agencies, each ca- 
pable of functions which the other cannot 
effectively perform ; but it must be perceived 
that the school has a peculiar responsibility, 
perhaps superior to that of any of the other 
agencies. In the school, the educational pro- 
cess must be visioned as a whole; and from 
the school must radiate the influences which 
will invigorate and direct the educational 
activities of other institutions. Hence, the 
school must cooperate actively, sympatheti- 
cally, and purposefully with the home, the 
church, the shop, the playground, the press, 
the stage, the club, and the library in their 
efforts to shape youth into serviceable man- 
hood and womanhood. Society is manifesting 



16 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

a growing tendency not only to place upon 
the school responsibility for the discharge of 
such desirable educational functions as other 
agencies cannot or will not perform; it is 
also making the school, in a sense, the final 
custodian on behalf of the State of the child's 
educational well-being. In the school will un- 
doubtedly develop those supplemental agencies 
designed, in the case of limited classes of de- 
fective, delinquent, and otherwise exceptional 
children, to make up for the deficiencies of 
other educational agencies. Here also will 
center those other forms of oversight and 
direction designed to compel needful action 
on the part of private and corporate agencies, 
where these touch and influence the develop- 
ment of childhood. 

It will be no small problem, in this con- 
nection, to prevent the school from unduly 
aggrandizing educational authority. So to re- 
adjust its attitude as to give full scope, with 
sympathetic cooperation, to other agencies 
will not be easy in view of the historic atti- 
tude of educators. Nevertheless, we read even 



THE NEW EDUCATION 17 

now of school credit being given for work of 
a useful nature performed at home; of agri- 
cultural schools in which the practical work 
is done on the "home farm"; of "part time" 
arrangements between shop and school for 
vocational training ; of vacation reading being 
required and counted towards college credit; 
of home practice in hygiene being purpose- 
fully integrated with school instruction in 
that subject; of physical work of a service- 
able nature being accepted in lieu of gym- 
nasium training; of wage-earning employ- 
ment being required as a necessary phase in 
completing courses in commercial training; 
and of cooperation between the school and 
the theater to the ends that the two forces 
may reinforce each other. These manifesta- 
tions but foreshadow the more varied develop- 
ments which are surely destined to appear 
when the larger educational vision shall de- 
velop. 

Having defined its aims in terms of a sound 
social economy, and having differentiated 



18 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

among various educational agencies as to the 
scope and character of their respective con- 
tributions to the totality of the educational 
process, the new education encounters a vari- 
ety of problems of adaptation among the in- 
dividuals and groups of individuals with whom 
it deals. The older education had a limited 
field of vision as to the social need it was to 
serve; its aims were relatively narrow, specific, 
and immediate. In the schools it ministered 
in the main to a restricted social class ; hence, 
its programs were uniform and lacking in 
flexibility. 

The large problem of social economy, as 
expressed in the ideals of democracy, is to 
enable each individual to make the most of 
himself, while at the same time contributing 
in as large degree as possible to the general 
well-being. There are distinct limits of an 
economic nature, however, to the social obli- 
gation to educate and otherwise to assist each 
individual towards self-realization. Moreover, 
it is certain that individuals vary enormously 
among themselves as to their inheritance of 



THE NEW EDUCATION 19 

capacities for the attainment of skill, insight, 
and ideal. As the possible scope and purposes 
of education increase, the boundaries of soci- 
ety's obligations on the one hand and the in- 
dividual's capacities on the other come into 
view. A uniform program of education is no 
longer possible. To an indefinite extent pro- 
grams must be adapted to varying groups. 

Here we distinguish the subnormal in in- 
tellect and we modify programs of training to 
their needs. We shall yet do much also to 
assist the supernormal to outmarch our slow- 
footed courses of study. Again, we discover 
varying tastes and deep-seated interests, sug- 
gesting the possibilities of enriching society 
by the cultivation of special talents. We find 
many youths in need of systematic training 
for vocational competency — an education 
which can only be given by public schools; 
but vocational education must be as varied as 
are the occupations demanding skill and tech- 
nical knowledge. The multiplicity of subjects 
has become so great within the field of the 
traditional school program as to force sec- 



20 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ondary school and college to provide endless 
forms of adaptation by allowing election of 
studies. 

Below the college and secondary school is 
to be found as yet but slight adaptation in 
courses of study; but it is inevitable that 
great flexibility should develop here as well. 
This will not be confined to the field com- 
monly occupied by the so-called school studies; 
it must extend into the as yet slightly explored 
regions of physical, moral, and vocational 
education. 

It is sometimes urged that the demands of 
democracy require uniformity of educational 
program. There must be no class education, 
as in Europe, it is said. This attitude reflects 
the influence of certain famous misunderstand- 
ings of the Declaration of Independence and 
of the motto of Revolutionary France. In na- 
tive capacity and in educational need people 
are unequal at birth and can in no way be 
made equal. An educational system, suited to 
the needs of democracy, must be indefinitely 
flexible in order that each may have before 



THE NEW EDUCATION 21 

him the educational opportunities which shall 
enable him best to serve society and himself. 
They who oppose the establishment of effective 
trade schools because they suspect that these 
tend to create class distinctions forget what 
sharp class distinctions are even now enforced 
by uniform programs of studies appealing only 
to those possessing unusual powers of abstract 
thinking. 

A flexible system of education, indefinitely 
varied to meet the needs of different groups, 
must, of course, in a democratic society, simply 
establish open doors of opportunity. The son 
of the washerwoman must be able to go to the 
university if his talents justify it ; and equally 
the son of the banker should be able to find 
his field of opportunity in a trade school, if his 
interests lie in that direction. Prescription and 
forced classification there must of necessity 
be ; but only as determined by the incapacity 
of the individual to profit from a given type 
of opportunity. Such forced classification now 
prevails extensively in our undemocratic school 
system, and is the more indefensible because 



22 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

of the limited range of educational opportunity 
offered in contemporary secondary schools and 
colleges. No extension of the range and scope 
of educational opportunity can operate to in- 
tensify class distinctions as these now prevail 
in America. A flexible system of educational 
opportunities will have the opposite effect. 

To teachers and to those engaged in the 
training of teachers, the most interesting and 
at the same time most difficult of the problems 
of the new education are to be found in con- 
nection with the developments of effective 
methods of teaching, after general aims and 
questions of adaptation have been measurably 
settled. 

Every person, in greater or less degree, pos- 
sesses an instinct for teaching ; while among 
every people at every period there exists a vast 
body of" teaching customs which are readily 
transmitted from generation to generation. 
Under the conditions which prevailed until 
very recently, the combination of the teach- 
ing instinct with prevailing customs sufficed 



THE NEW EDUCATION 23 

to give a body of teaching methods sufficient 
for the existing needs of education in home, 
church, and school. 

But the methods thus developed (the word 
covers methods of organizing known bodies 
of knowledge and experience for teaching pur- 
poses as well as actual method of presentation) 
were, naturally, unscientific ; they lacked flex- 
ibility, and especially they were unadapted 
to the carrying-out of the nicer adjustments 
demanded when broader educational aims de- 
veloped. 

It was long ago evident to such educa- 
tional geniuses as Comenius, Rousseau, and 
Froebel that in education, no less than in other 
forms of human activity, where custom played 
a large part, the letter was always in danger 
of being allowed to kill the spirit. Form was 
ever tending to take the place of substance. 
Methods of educating, taking their start in 
some period of rapid change, soon grew stereo- 
typed and rigid. Modes of practice, inspired 
and projected by great leaders, were taken up 
by cults composed of persons unable fully to 



24 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

apprehend them, and soon degenerated into 
crystallized forms and ceremonies. 

It is now apparent that for the new educa- 
tion, teaching methods transmitted as custom 
products (social habits) will not suffice. It 
matters not that these should owe their origins 
to the genius of a leader, rather than to the 
selective action of time. So innumerable are 
the adjustments required by the new educa- 
tion, on account of its varied aims and possible 
adaptations, that only a body of method, based 
on a scientific study of the processes of the 
learning mind of the child as a practical reality, 
will suffice. 

Efforts to evolve new and better methods 
on a basis of insight into the learning processes 
have given rise to much of the educational 
unrest of recent years. Naturally, the con- 
servatives in education, like those in religion, 
politics, industry, and elsewhere, prefer the 
established custom procedures and resent all 
attempts to evaluate old methods and to de- 
vise new ones. Nevertheless, some progress is 
being made, some of it due to the " trial and 



THE NEW EDUCATION 25 

success " methods stimulated by loss of faith 
in old ways, and some of it due to newly ac- 
quired knowledge of child nature. We may 
say roughly that the program of primary edu- 
cation has already been materially modified by 
the newer methods, while in the more advanced 
grades and in the secondary school there has 
been a profound disturbance of thought and 
attitude, but as yet little of practical accom- 
plishment. 

The most marked feature of the newer de- 
velopments in this field is the discovery that 
the older education had formulated all its con- 
scious methods of teaching on one plane of 
learning capacity. All its music was composed, 
if the figure may be permitted, in one key. 
Subject-matter was organized to be memorized 
or learned by rote ; and where the ends aimed 
at did not permit this, as in penmanship, the 
drill methods employed were strictly analogous 
to those of memorization. All subjects were 
taught in the same general way, and the only 
available means of testing learning consisted 
in examining memorization. Rarely was it 



26 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

thought necessary or deemed possible to go 
deeper and to test the actual functioning of 
knowledge or habit in terms of life's larger 
utilities. 

To many other processes of education, now 
consciously recognized, the older education 
indeed made contributions ; but in an almost 
wholly unorganized and methodless way. 
Education through play, the self-active quest 
of knowledge, the subtle influence of sugges- 
tion in numberless directions, the upbuilding 
of ideals — these had their place ; but on 
these planes of learning, there existed no text- 
books or teachers' manuals, no approved de- 
vices and methods, no testing of results. 

It should not be a matter of surprise that 
in the general field of method the new educa- 
tion is encountering so many problems of re- 
adjustment. In a subsequent chapter attention 
will be called to the probability that, as be- 
tween the methods of teaching based on forced 
memorization and drill, and those utilizing self- 
activity in large measure, there is a subtle but 
real opposition. If such is the case, the new me- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 27 

thods must in many cases be something vastly 
different from mere refinements of the old. 
They must be differently grounded and derived. 
The new education will no more be satisfied 
with reliance upon a blind instinct of teaching 
in affecting the deeper reaches of the child's 
life than is modern medicine satisfied with 
only the instincts of tenderness, sympathy, and 
self-sacrifice in the nurse. Education through 
play, through the influence of personality, and 
through giving scope to the creative capaci- 
ties will require its own basal methods no less 
than that other education which, in seeking 
results in the teaching of spelling, multipli- 
cation tables, and grammar, has produced the 
methods of drill and memorization. But such 
methods must be based on scientific insight 
no less than are the nurses' conceptions of 
aseptic cleanliness. The new education has as 
one of its large obligations to discover the 
various foundations of educational method. 

We may, finally, consider the readjustments 
necessary in the public administration of the 



28 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

new education. For, whatever be our convic- 
tions as to the proper sphere of government, 
we must admit that a large and probably in- 
creasing part of education will have to be car- 
ried on as a public enterprise. Public funds 
will be required to support it ; and public di- 
rection and control must follow the employ- 
ment of public funds. 

But the administration of education by the 
State presents features of a peculiar character. 
Evidently, expert service will be more and 
more needed ; but equally an intimate union 
of education with public sentiment and opin- 
ion will always be required. In the adminis- 
tration of public education, therefore, we find 
that the pressing problems of democracy are 
acutely in evidence. 

No system of public education can long re- 
main vital and effective if it does not have an 
intelligent and approving public opinion sup- 
porting it. The citizen's money must support 
the schools ; a large part of the time and hap- 
piness, as well as sometimes the health and 
future possibilities, of his children are in the 



THE NEW EDUCATION 29 

custody of the teachers; and it is probable 
that the school will assert its responsibility in 
requiring that home education shall also be 
effective. Complex relations of this kind are 
possible only when intimate mutual under- 
standing and confidence prevail. Democratic 
society seeks to procure these conditions by 
localizing the administration of public edu- 
cation, by giving the popular will free scope 
in selecting representatives on lay governing 
bodies, and by giving such laymen large au- 
thority over teachers and school practices. 

But the new education cannot develop with- 
out expert service and the conditions which 
make expert service possible. Teachers must 
not only be well trained for their work ; they 
must be, as far as practicable, chosen from 
the ablest members of the community; and 
they should work under conditions which make 
effectiveness possible. Teaching must become 
a profession, and an attractive profession. 
Proper selection of candidates for teaching, 
proper training, proper compensation, proper 
tenure, proper freedom from unwarranted in- 



30 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

terference — these are but a few of the con- 
ditions essential to the expert direction of the 
new education. 

Can democratic government produce these 
conditions? Can popular control resist the 
tendencies of professions to become bureau- 
cratic and to alienate themselves from popular 
demands? 

It is evident that to achieve the ends of ef- 
fective administration, the new education will 
necessitate many readjustments of prevailing 
practices. Some of these are discussed in a 
subsequent chapter. Here it only remains to 
point out that to administer public education 
successfully will bring into relief and perhaps 
contribute to the solution of the problems of 
an expert, specialized service, working under 
and leading the popular will. Public education 
will require its expert service ; but this expert 
service must of necessity be capable of edu- 
cating not merely the children of each gener- 
ation, but the generation itself. Educators 
must interpret their problems in terms of so- 
ciety as a whole. They must lead in the de- 



THE NEW EDUCATION 31 

velopment of chieftainship for no traditional 
or adventitious reasons, but by sheer ability 
to win confidence on their own merits. Edu- 
cators must trust the public ; and they must 
wisely fashion a public which they can trust. 
Publicity is but one of the instruments to this 
end ; the creation of active channels of com- 
munication between specialists and laymen is 
no less important. 

We cannot now predict the forms of organi- 
zation by means of which a union of the serv- 
ices of experts and of the supporting attitude 
of the public is to be effected. It may be that 
for this purpose the school will have to be 
regarded as the primary unit of administration 
to a greater extent than is now the case. The 
city will require for financial and other gen- 
eral management of the schools a small central 
school board and the highly specialized serv- 
ices of experts ; but, because in each school 
are to be gathered teachers and supervising 
specialists, it may prove expedient to create, 
for the district served by such a school com- 
mittee, a council, representing lay interests 



32 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

and capable of being made a means of diffus- 
ing knowledge regarding the aims, needs, and 
achievement of the school. By devices of this 
nature, it may prove possible to realize the 
cooperation which is indispensable to an ef- 
ficient system of modern schools serving in, 
and supported by, a democracy. 



II 

THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 

The study of the art and science of educa- 
tion to-day involves, among other phases, con- 
sideration of the learning processes as these 
are connected with the various subjects making 
up the curricula of our schools. The study of 
method may be approached from either one of 
two standpoints. On the one hand, in connec- 
tion with the organization of the content and 
in the development of devices of presentation 
of the special subjects, such as the mechanics 
of reading, number work, writing, chemistry, 
French, drawing, and the others, we obtain 
the studies of special method ; on the other 
hand, when the educational process is viewed 
less with reference to the mastery of special 
subjects and more with reference to the physi- 
ological and psychological processes involved, 
we have general method. In the former case 
the peculiar characteristics of various forms of 



34 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

subject-matter largely determine method ; in 
the latter, the main influence comes from a 
consideration of the educational ends to be 
attained, as these may be expressed in terms 
of habits to be formed, appreciations to be 
stimulated, knowledge to be acquired, and 
ideals to be developed. A study of the learn- 
ing process, when special method is under con- 
sideration, tends to expend its effort on sub- 
ject-matter ; while the influence of the study 
of general method is to emphasize the powers 
and processes of the learner himselfc 

Historically it would seem to be true, except 
at rare intervals, that the development of the 
art of teaching tended to center about the 
thing which it was deemed desirable to have 
the child learn. Hence the processes of trial, 
experiment, and selection have tended to pro- 
duce an elaborate body of method — method 
of organization of subject-matter as well as 
method of presentation — in connection with 
each one of the studies. Each division of 
mathematics, each phase of the study of the 
vernacular, writing, drawing, Latin, manual 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 35 

training, history, each one of the sciences — 
in every case we find a more or less detailed 
and elaborated methodology. And running 
through it all we find one prominent charac- 
teristic : the organization of subjects for teach- 
ing purposes seems to have been effected by 
mature and scholarly minds which have made 
but grudging acknowledgment that the limita- 
tions and peculiarities of the child mind might 
have to be taken into account in making the 
learning process most effective. Only seldom, 
historically speaking, have textbooks been writ- 
ten or other organizations of the subject-matter 
of special studies been produced by those who, 
either by virtue of keen sympathy and intui- 
tion, or even owing to long experience, could 
enter easily into the interests, capacities, and 
points of view of children. And it must be 
remembered that it has been chiefly in the 
organization of the special subjects that, in 
the past, conscious method manifested itself. 
Note how the adult and scholarly mind has 
worked in producing the teaching organiza- 
tions of the special school subjects. In propor- 



36 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

tion as knowledge has developed in each sub- 
ject, underlying principles have come into view 
and logical system has developed. Through 
long experience and study the mature mind 
comes to grasp the general outlines and prin- 
ciples of a study, and, having found a few 
simple keys to the whole, which simplifies it 
for him, he immediately assumes that such 
order should be most effective in teaching 
children. Not many years ago the student of 
script letters was able to discern a few simple 
elements of which nearly all the letters were 
composed. What more natural than that a 
scheme of penmanship teaching (now happily 
obsolete) should be developed which would 
involve as the central feature of its method 
the complete preliminary mastery of these 
elements ? Again, it is found that drawing in 
many of its phases involves the application of 
a few elemental forms ; and, naturally, systems 
of drawing for children have been developed 
which require that years shall be spent in drill 
on these elemental forms. The varied pro- 
cesses of applied arithmetic may be compre- 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 37 

hended in a small number of fundamental 
rules ; the complexity of machines may be re- 
solved into six or even two fundamental forms ; 
the study of the plant world may be approached 
through the classifications which order and 
simplify it; and so on for each subject which 
enters into the schools. And in each case that 
logical order inherent in the subject has been 
seized upon by the adult maker of schemes 
of study as giving the most effective basis of 
method for teaching purposes. 

So long as teachers failed to study the learn- 
ing process as conditioned partly by the limi- 
tations and peculiar powers of the child's mind, 
it was natural that this should be true. To the 
discoverer and admirer of organization in the 
various divisions of knowledge, it was inevit- 
able to think of these as exhibiting the most 
effective way for the young learner. If all 
penmanship may be reduced to a half-dozen 
fundamental forms, why not secure the mas- 
tery of these at the outset ? If all reading in- 
volves the alphabet, and the ability to unite 
its members into untold numbers of meaning- 



38 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ful and meaningless syllables, why not give 
the first two or three years to drill on letters 
and syllables ? If the mastery of tool processes 
seems to involve, sooner or later, a limited 
number of detailed and very special types of 
skill, why not strive for these at the outset, 
as has been done in certain types of manual 
training? There have been times when the 
study of a foreign language began and con- 
tinued long with its grammar ; when the study 
of literature was mostly a study of the lives of 
authors and lists of their work ; when the study 
of music, at least in the schools, was mainly a 
study of the written technique of music ; when 
the study of history was an attempted mastery 
of the dates and the far-reaching generaliza- 
tions of history. We have seen the study of 
physics by beginners confined mainly to tasks 
in quantitative work, because the mature mind 
finds quantitative method so serviceable. Not 
long since the teaching of biology by many 
teachers was organized on the basis of a logical 
system beginning with the most elemental 
forms. While it may not be true that all of 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 39 

our studies still exhibit these vices at their 
worst, it may well be questioned whether the 
studies as we have them organized for chil- 
dren, especially in the upper elementary grades 
and secondary schools, are not even yet prim- 
arily determined in their method by logical 
and other considerations quite external to the 
intrinsic capacities of the learner himself. 

On the other hand, when the educator tends 
to study the learning processes largely apart 
from special subjects of study or apart from 
the bias which a too exclusive consideration 
of subject-matter seems to give, and more with 
reference to the child as a self-active organ- 
ism, developing in a material and social en- 
vironment which in itself is stimulating and 
educative, it is natural that the traditional 
school subjects should receive less considera- 
tion. For, under these circumstances, the edu- 
cator realizes that, in any environment, a large 
part of the sum-total of learning is quite inde- 
pendent of artificial direction and manipula- 
tion. Nature has so equipped the child with 
instincts and impulses that he literally must 



40 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

learn. A thousand physical adjustments, some 
of them very complex, he will learn even if 
deprived of human example. In the presence 
of human example the mere exercise of the 
instincts of imitation and invention gives him 
speech and numberless other social habits and 
appreciations. During the years ordinarily 
given to school life, the youth will, if a savage, 
or if loose among his fellows and his elders, 
acquire a vast range of useful habits, signifi- 
cant knowledge, and influential ideals. For all 
this learning no schools need be provided, no 
teachers' salaries paid, no textbooks or schemes 
of study organized. Even more significant, 
there are required no long hours of confine- 
ment at hard desks, no penalties and rewards, 
and no final examinations. It is all part of 
the natural growth process, as spontaneous as 
the play of animals or the flowering of plants. 
Viewing education from this side, it is na- 
tural that the enthusiastic man who is little 
concerned with special subjects should desire 
to make all education simply a somewhat wider 
and somewhat more directed form of that edu- 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 41 

cational process which nature organized for 
human beings long before schools were dreamed 
of. Method, from this standpoint, becomes 
less a matter of the fine adjustment of this or 
that bit of external knowledge or process of 
acquiring skill, than of providing a rich en- 
vironment and a field for free expression of 
native powers, to the end that the child will, 
through sheer force of the unrestricted, but 
guided and aided, growth process, reach the 
higher levels of habit, appreciation, knowl- 
edge, and ideal. Under the influence of this 
conception, the belief develops that in each 
department of human knowledge and attain- 
ment there is somewhere an order of approach 
and development which closely corresponds to 
the natural growth process and which is the 
most effective teaching order on the one side 
and learning order on the other. The essence 
of method, as here conceived, consists in put- 
ting the child in an environment of suitable 
stimuli and then allowing the natural learning 
powers to do their inevitable work. Not the 
perfect organization of subject-matter accord- 



42 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ing to logical schemes, it is asserted, but the 
presentation of it in ways that correspond to 
the child's native powers, is the function of 
true educational method. If the child has in- 
herently a thirst for knowledge, why may we 
not lead him into an environment of knowl- 
edge, geographical, historical, or scientific, 
and leave him free until his natural demand 
for aid in organizing it shall again call on 
us for additional suggestion ? If the unspoiled 
child craves expression through speech, through 
drawing, and through constructive activities, 
why should we organize this or that scheme 
which is denaturalized by adult experience 
rather than provide him the tools, the objects, 
and the suggestion which will suffice to draw 
forth his own activities? So questions the 
theorist in this field, but it must be admitted 
that he can as yet point to no well-developed 
scheme of instruction based on his theory. 

The influence of this conception has, how- 
ever, been sufficiently great in recent years to 
produce considerable modification in educa- 
tional method. In some slight degree it has 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 43 

tended to introduce new kinds of subject- 
matter. More important for present purposes, 
it has tended to affect the methods of organ- 
izing and presenting the traditional subjects 
— for, after all, the schools may not aim at 
the complete educative process, and their field 
is largely determined by the traditional or- 
ganizations of knowledge and skill which we 
call subjects — and in providing certain new 
ideas as to educational aims. In much of pri- 
mary teaching the logical organization of sub- 
ject-matter has largely given way to a teach- 
ing order, empirically determined, which is 
sometimes called psychological or natural, and 
which is unquestionably more effective and 
economical. With regard to the subjects more 
adapted to older children we hear it constantly 
insisted that we must search for a more peda- 
gogical order for the reason that the older 
and more artificial order of organizing and 
presenting subject-matter fails to interest pu- 
pils, fails to produce a valuable permanent 
result, and tends to bring school education 
into disrepute. 



44 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

It can easily be shown that in the primary 
schools of to-day children are rarely taught 
penmanship, reading, and number according 
to the more strictly logical methods once in 
vogue. Drills on the alphabet and on the ele- 
mental forms of letters as used in writing are 
not necessarily abandoned, but they follow a 
considerable time after the pupil's introduc- 
tion to printed and written words as some- 
thing nearly allied to the objects about which 
he thinks and cares. Primary teaching has 
found avenues of approach from the object, 
through the picture and other concrete repre- 
sentation, and on to the purely abstract sym- 
bol which, whatever their inherent lack of 
system, as that appeals to the adult mind, con- 
stitute a far more effective order for the naive 
powers of the young learner than any which 
preceded. In the teaching of drawing we are 
now in the midst of a transition from the 
logical, uninteresting, and, for the majority 
of children, less effective formal processes to 
more natural processes (natural from the stand- 
point of the child learner), but which are still 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 45 

experimental. The same transition is in process 
in manual work. It is recognized that the child, 
left to himself in an environment that is full of 
suggestion towards constructive activity due 
to the presence of tools, the opportunity to 
use them, and the suggestion of elders at 
work, becomes spontaneously an imitator and 
develops powers and interests which no formal 
processes of teaching can give. Left to him- 
self, the child uses tools, first with little pur- 
pose, then in a deliberate attempt to realize 
aims and projects partly due to suggestion 
and partly due to invention. But, as educa- 
tors clearly see, the forms of manual training 
which have already largely become traditional 
take little account of childish capacities, and 
derive their chief principles of organization and 
method from the carefully studied experiences 
of mature workers. These forms of manual 
training not only do not encourage naive child- 
ish tendencies, but even flout them by laying 
an embargo upon the child's native desires to 
experiment and to try to make things which 
have for him a genuine significance in use. 



46 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

Recent developments in the teaching of 
mathematics point also to the influence of the 
conception that logical organization of subject- 
matter is not a final basis for the method of 
the teaching order. For it is believed by the 
proponents of the so-called Perry movement 
that the central deficiency in the teaching of 
mathematics at the present time is the too 
great insistence upon the logical and abstract, 
to the exclusion of the concrete and applied. 
Teaching geometry largely through its appli- 
cations certainly appears at war with the sim- 
ple and orderly teaching that is based on the 
strictly logical organization of that subject; 
but experience may show that there are many 
paths through applied geometry which reach 
the real goal of learning more effectively 
than the traditional approaches. Among the 
sciences, it is apparent that in the best teach- 
ing of nature study, modern method is coming 
nearer to a more natural order, as concerns 
the learner. It is noteworthy that biology in 
secondary education, whether under that name, 
or as botany and zoology, has attempted many 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 47 

schemes based upon the logical organization 
of subject-matter which appeals to the mature 
scientist, but without success ; and that in the 
best secondary schools it is now following 
various experimental orders which are frankly 
claimed to be psychological or pedagogical in 
their nature. 

Illustrations might be multiplied. On both 
sides of the question are camps of those who 
teach geography, to some extent teachers in 
one, and geographers in the other. The his- 
torians have given the world new definitions 
of history and new tests of its organization, 
and are insisting that those who teach history 
to children shall accept their criteria ; and edu- 
cators who think they understand children are 
waiting expectantly for the man who is at once 
historian and also learned in, or intuitive of, 
the ways of growing youth. In some respects 
a natural method in selecting and presenting 
the materials of literature has been found for 
all the grades ; but so far it is not believed 
that the American secondary school shows 
traces of this influence, though the English 



48 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

secondary school has felt it to some extent. 
In the teaching of modern languages there 
are methods called natural, but whether they 
are actually pedagogical is still a question of 
fact. 

The foregoing account presents in outline 
two great and in large part opposed theoretic 
foundations of method. The first grows out 
of the exclusive consideration of those phases 
of human experience which are chosen as the 
subjects of school education, and is primarily 
characterized by the logical organization which 
develops in the mind of the adult student and 
the most inclusive thinker ; this logical order 
and full content modified, reduced, and diluted 
only where painful experience renders it abso- 
lutely necessary to make certain accommoda- 
tions to the child's immaturity (or stupidity, 
as some are prone to think). The second repre- 
sents an attempt to utilize to the full the pos- 
sibilities of the learning processes which are a 
part of the natural inheritance, the teacher 
acting as a guide, example, and purveyor of 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 49 

opportunities for learning rather than dictator 
of content and method. In the first, the thing 
to be taught determines method ; in the second, 
natural processes of learning claim chief at- 
tention. The ultimate ends are not greatly 
different; under both theories there is sub- 
stantial agreement as to the elements of the 
social inheritance whose mastery must be made 
the end of school education. The essential 
opposition lies in the methods of attaining 
these ends. 

The educational literature of the day 
abounds in criticism of each theory and espe- 
cially of the observed results of the application 
of each theory. It is believed by many educa- 
tors that schemes of teaching built largely 
through study of subject-matter are failing to 
produce results. Especially is this believed to 
be true in the field of secondary education 
where the influences of recent pedagogical 
thinking have, as yet, hardly been felt. It is 
contended that formal education does not 
function in any kind of genuine experience, 
or that it functions abnormally. Faulty method 



50 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

produces mental sterility, and compels the 
children to forsake the school in order to gain 
contact with reality, as that answers to their 
instinctive demands. In some quarters it is 
believed that many of the evils growing out 
of wrong methods of teaching which take 
little account of the natural capacities and 
limitations of children are insidious in their 
nature and, detected long after the harm has 
been done, cannot be traced to their real cause. 
Good ground can be found for the assertion 
that the too logical organization of subject- 
matter (which means, in effect, that it becomes 
too much removed from the processes of learn- 
ing on the natural level) may be responsible 
for a subtle arrest of development in the men- 
tal and moral nature of the child, comparable, 
in its results, to premature and maladjusted 
physical labor on the body. Attempts at learn- 
ing carried along in opposition to the natural 
processes result finally in a paralysis of inter- 
est and an incapacity for spontaneous and 
active effort in the fields of human experience 
involved. Hence the seeming paradox that we 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 51 

may, by extensive teaching of English litera- 
ture (in ways remote from natural), destroy 
all taste and appreciation for the kinds of 
literature which we teach. Hence the proba- 
bility that modern methods of teaching science 
in secondary schools may, except in a few 
cases, destroy the native curiosity and interest 
which, if permitted or encouraged to grow in 
more natural ways, might result in permanent 
increase of pleasure and capacity in these 
fields. Hence the observed fact that wrong 
methods of teaching religion and morality, 
methods themselves the outgrowth of too ex- 
clusive consideration of the subject as it ap- 
pealed to mature leaders and thinkers, have 
operated so as to stultify true development in 
these directions. In general the criticism is 
repeatedly advanced that the limitations of a 
pedagogy built largely on considerations of 
the logical order of subject-matter are not 
found so much in the immediately recognized 
difficulties of teaching as in the permanent 
arrest of development which ultimately super- 
venes. From the standpoint of the modern 



52 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

educator there is something quite pathetic in 
the ease with which children can be artifieial- 
ized in the educative process. They can be 
taught schemes of language, literature, science, 
history, and other studies with apparent good 
result, and can be successfully crammed for the 
tests which examinations provide. It is only 
when we consider the deeper significance of it 
all, say the critics, in producing individual 
and social arrest of development and ultimate 
decay, that we can realize that nature has es- 
tablished certain paths of educational pro- 
cedure which cannot be greatly ignored except 
at our peril. 

On the other hand, schemes of method 
based more nearly on the supposed natural 
process are frequently open to the criticism 
that the interest they evoke is temporary rather 
than permanent, that they fail to produce the 
concrete results in habit and knowledge which 
the world demands, that they tend to make of 
the youth a barbarian or " natural savage " 
rather than the refined and molded man de- 
manded by modern society. Where the move- 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 53 

ment for a less artificial education has had its 
effect on method, it is claimed that there has 
been a decline in certain measurable kinds of 
efficiency. Children read and write less well 
than formerly; their arithmetical knowledge 
is imperfect and unusable ; their knowledge of 
history and geography is vague and mixed with 
much error ; their execution in drawing, lan- 
guage, and manual work is slipshod and char- 
acterized by low ideals and lack of standards. 
What does it profit a child if he have great 
interest in learning to spell if he never learn 
to spell ? As was said before, primary teach- 
ing has unquestionably justified the change 
in the basis of method ; but it can hardly be 
said that the same is true of the attempts to 
reorganize the subjects of the upper grades 
and the high school. 

To the criticisms of the second theory it 
may be answered, of course, that any method- 
ology based on a consideration of the natural 
learning processes must be a matter of slow 
growth and that we can hardly expect any 
great achievements until, in the upper schools, 



54 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

methods shall have been experimentally worked 
out, as they have already been worked out in 
the primary schools. But this is small satis- 
faction in view of the fact that it is especially 
in the maturer pupils that the world demands 
some tangible evidence of the results of edu- 
cation. 

Where, then, can the practical educator of 
to-day find a sound basis of method, one that 
will combine a maximum of good with a mini- 
mum of evil ? The writer believes that a care- 
ful study of the best educational experiments 
of recent times and of the processes involved 
in procuring excellent results in the physical, 
moral, and vocational education of individuals 
and groups in the past will show that in all 
best method there is involved a conscious or 
unconscious recognition of the two large prin- 
ciples discussed above, but each in a definite 
relation to particular stages of the learning 
process. In individuals or among groups of 
individuals education has become sterile, 
cramping, and repulsive when its votaries have 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 55 

too greatly intruded the adult point of view 
and the mechanical forms of adult thinking 
on youth ; and on the other hand, when en- 
thusiastic teachers and educational prophets 
have been able to supplant traditional subjects 
and methods with others supposed to lie near 
to the lines of natural and unforced develop- 
ment, there has been a failure to realize the 
habits, forms of skill, and definite knowledge 
which social conditions demand. But when- 
ever and wherever it has been possible to com- 
bine the two principles it would seem that 
education has more nearly approximated a 
maximum of efficiency. 

On the basis of this accumulated experience 
it would seem, for example, other things being 
equal, that in organizing human experience 
for the purpose of teaching young children, 
the pedagogical rather than the logical order 
should receive consideration, but that with 
increasing maturity of mind there might be a 
gradual shifting of emphasis to the logical. 
Again, other things being equal, and age be- 
ing left out of consideration, it would appear 



56 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

that the early contact of the child or youth 
with a new field of human experience which 
is to be made his through the learning process, 
should be governed by pedagogical rather 
than logical considerations. Again, within any 
study which is long pursued for the sake of a 
considerable body of habit or knowledge, it 
would seem desirable to vary the procedure 
from natural to logical and the reverse around 
each fairly large unit which might develop 
within that subject-matter. The reasons for 
this shifting from one organizing principle of 
method to another lie in the fact that under- 
lying all formal, logical, and highly systema- 
tized learning is a substratum of kindled feel- 
ing and interest, crude first-hand knowledge, 
and aspiration and ideal such as spring from 
large self-activity. These rough, undifferenti- 
ated, and pervasive qualities are best developed 
by those forms of learning which approximate 
the spontaneous. They seem to be basal to 
permanent interests and to the fullest develop- 
ment of organized and systematized habit and 
knowledge to be acquired later. The idea might 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 57 

be expressed in another way by saying that 
the true educative process consists in first pro- 
viding abundant opportunities for that devel- 
opment, in connection with any study or prac- 
tice, which comes from the largely spontaneous 
exercise of the instincts and other natural 
capacities ; and then in proceeding to build 
on this foundation the habit, skill, knowledge, 
and ideal which are demanded of civilized con- 
ditions, and which require what we term arti- 
ficial organization on the one hand to corre- 
spond to artificial requirements, or logical on 
the other as best exhibiting the grasp which 
experience and insight have attained in the 
world of knowledge. 

A few examples will make this clear. The 
child in a stimulating environment of imple- 
ments and suggestion naturally seeks to ex- 
press himself through drawing. His early 
drawing is crude, imperfect, and shows lack 
of knowledge of elemental principles. But in 
freely expressing himself the child gains a 
body of experience and some skill which may 
be fundamental to later development in this 



58 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

direction. Play, of course, provides an analo- 
gous situation in the fields of physical, social, 
and vocational development. Or take the case 
of a boy provided with the means and sugges- 
tion for work in physical science. Left to him- 
self such a boy reads, experiments, procures 
crude results, all of which may not apparently 
advance him far in the systematic study of 
physical principles or in the acquisition of 
skill of manipulation. Yet there is good reason 
for suspecting that the boy who does not have 
opportunity for this stage of development 
(which is not now allowed by the schools) 
comes to the systematic study of physics with 
an insufficient background of experience and 
interest, and these cannot be developed by 
the logically arranged courses of experiments 
and study of principles found in the schools. 
It may well be questioned, in view of the re- 
sults in our schools, whether the systematic 
study of literature in upper grades should not 
be preceded by an extensive provision of op- 
portunities for reading, largely along the line 
of the natural tendencies, exercised, of course, 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 59 

in an environment of wholesome material 
and suggestion. Similarly in the field of his- 
tory. To the child, as to primitive man, his- 
tory is more than a cold account of facts ; it 
is something which involves feeling, imagina- 
tion, ideal. Left to himself the child may tend 
to gather his experience of the past and re- 
mote from song, picture, tale, myth, novel, and 
epic as well as from the books which offer 
more exact statements of fact. Whether we 
study the lives of peoples or the biographies 
of individuals, we have yet no evidence that 
the approach to history through the above chan- 
nels is not the most natural and, in the long run, 
most effective. The danger, of course, lies in 
the fact that so many individuals are allowed 
to stop before they have acquired some of the 
methods and content of exact historical study. 
But no less great at the present time is the 
danger that young children will be fed on 
historian's history, which is good for the his- 
torian, but may be husks for children. Illus- 
trations might be multiplied from other sub- 
jects of ordinary curricula. 



60 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

Can we, then, say that we have already with 
us to some extent a new basis of method? 
Can we not in connection with any study or 
pursuit of the schools recognize that what 
might be called the processes and methods of 
spontaneous learning require recognition up 
to a certain point, after which a transition 
should be made to the methods begotten of 
mature human wisdom acting on past experi- 
ence? It seems to the writer that we have al- 
ready a partial recognition of these large facts, 
but that in connection with certain schools 
and types of education we refuse to allow 
ourselves to escape the habits and preposses- 
sions of tradition, or that the school teacher 
allows himself to be enslaved by methods de- 
veloped in schools where mature people study. 
A great difficulty lies in the general unwill- 
ingness to make education an experimental 
field of applied science and art. When, in any 
given subject of study, we have a carefully 
worked out logical organization, it involves 
a courageous and adventurous disposition 
to depart from it and to seek in the wilds 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 61 

that organization which will carry more of an 
appeal to, and be more effective with, the 
beginning student. In the absence of any 
complete or helpful knowledge of genetic psy- 
chology, every teacher who would utilize the 
natural processes of learning as foundations 
for later systematization of knowledge and 
habit |is obliged to experiment, and some- 
times almost blindly. Here the methods of 
trial and error and selection are yet largely 
necessary. 

It is, however, essential that the educa- 
tor get some conception of the principles in- 
volved. Doubtless we can say of much Ameri- 
can primary education that it recognizes the 
principles, so far as small children are con- 
cerned. Yet it is of importance that we recog- 
nize that, after all, it may not be a question 
of age that is involved so much as the rela- 
tion of the content and development of the 
mind to a study or practice (or, more signifi- 
cant, the large units within these) which is 
about to be taken up. It may be that even 
the fairly mature mind, approaching a unit of 



62 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

knowledge or practice with which it has thus 
far no connections, should make its first 
approaches largely along the planes closely 
related to natural learning. It may be that 
the chief weakness of our secondary educa- 
tion is that it fails to make allowance for 
a modicum of natural learning before the 
highly systematic organizations of material 
are taken up. It may be that the constant 
complaint in high school and college of the 
immaturity and unpreparedness of the stu- 
dent has its real source, not in the lack of 
technical skill and specific knowledge, but 
in the unpreparedness of attitude and inter- 
est and basal experience which in so many 
cases are not the fruits of our present me- 
thods. 

No basis of method can be successful in a 
permanent way which does not recognize, on 
the one hand, the fundamental and pervasive 
character of the learning processes which na- 
ture developed long before the advent of 
modern culture ; nor, on the other hand, 
the imperative demands of modern social 



THE NEW BASIS OF METHOD 63 

and cultural life in regulating, organizing, 
and rendering efficient these same learning 
processes along specific lines. It should be 
apparent that the logical organization of sub- 
ject-matter represents something very use- 
ful as a basis of method, if not introduced 
too prematurely in the mental and moral 
evolution of the child. What is needed is 
care in providing the child, as a prelimin- 
ary to learning on the artificial level, with an 
abundance of experience on the natural plane. 
Sometimes the home does this, and it is easy to 
see that the more immediate industrial life of 
the farm and the shop in past centuries was a 
rich source of this basal experience. But if the 
home does not provide it, whether in cultural, 
social, or vocational directions, then the school 
must do so, in the interests of effective edu- 
cation. The new basis of method involves, on 
the one hand, a guarantee of this fundamental 
experience as a basis of motive, interest, and 
first-hand knowledge ; but it also involves the 
necessity of building on this foundation a 
structure of organized habit, systematized 



64 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

knowledge, and efficient ideal, which subse- 
quent course of learning may very fully in- 
volve the logical and artificial organization of 
subject-matter. 



Ill 

WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 

Is liberal education losing in power to at- 
tract youth? This is alleged in many quarters. 
In college^and secondary school, the studies 
which wear a vocational aspect are being pre- 
ferred, we are told, to those that minister to 
the larger ideals of life. Education toward 
practical achievement is being sought by an 
increasing number of students, while the num- 
bers of those seeking in the humanities the 
elevating influences which a higher civiliza- 
tion needs do not increase proportionately. 
The advocates of an effective vocational edu- 
cation are not infrequently embarrassed by 
the charge that they are promoting the decay 
of much that makes for kindled ideal, sympa- 
thetic insight and personal culture. They 
have not always the hardihood to suggest that 
perhaps the waning of interest in liberal edu- 
cation may be occasioned largely by lack of 
adaptation in its own instruments and methods. 



66 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

May it not be possible that the demand for 
the essentials of liberal education is no less 
strong than formerly, but that ancient ways 
of meeting it no longer suffice ? 

Clearly, better foundations are needed for 
liberal education in school and college. Pro- 
fessors and teachers of the liberal arts still 
reflect in a measure the ideals and methods of 
the cloister and of the leisured world in which 
their calling found its aristocratic and exclu- 
sive origins. Quite naturally, they are usually 
strong in their faiths, and resentful of scrutiny 
into the social validity of their purposes ; and 
it would be surprising if, under the circum- 
stances, they proved themselves able to evalu- 
ate in any fundamental way the effectiveness 
of their means and methods in promoting cul- 
ture and social worth under modern demo- 
cratic conditions. 

Schoolmen — teachers of the liberal arts in 
school and college — can be credited with a 
fine devotion to the study of those fields of 
knowledge in which their scholarly interests 
lie j but, with rare exceptions, they have not 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 67 

been students of teaching. They have mas- 
tered subject-matter, the means of education, 
— but not pedagogy, the art of effectively ap- 
plying the means. They have not yet evolved 
a satisfactory philosophy of liberal education 
to supersede the store of educational dogmas, 
psychological misconceptions, and cultural 
mysticisms which they inherited. 

Yet our schools and colleges are thronged 
as never before by those seeking or sent to 
seek higher education. Over a million boys 
and girls, under no legal compulsion, now 
pursue the traditional types of liberal learning 
in public secondary schools in America ; and 
the men and women in the colleges are to be 
numbered by hundreds of thousands. But 
much of the work done in these institutions 
is without clear purpose, and is therefore 
largely futile as regards the finer ends of 
liberal education. 

Efficiency in education, as elsewhere in the 
regions of conscious effort, involves on the 
one hand a fairly clear conception of goals to 
be reached, and on the other a degree of cer- 



68 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

titude as to the probable functioning of the 
means and methods employed. Our institutions 
devoted to liberal education are not able to ap- 
ply to themselves tests of efficiency along these 
lines ; they have no acceptable formulations of 
their purposes ; and equally (and partly as a 
consequence) they have no sufficient evidence 
as to the efficacy of the procedures which they 
use. These schools receive the picked person- 
alities of the community, from the standpoint 
both of natural inheritance and of social sur- 
roundings. Intelligent men and women nat- 
urally expect the schools to enhance in marked 
degree the civic and cultural possibilities of 
these young people. Neither parents nor pub- 
lic are satisfied with the results. In spite of 
the large attendance in school and college, 
faculties allege that there is a waning of in- 
terest in intellectual pursuits. Students are 
perfunctory in their devotion to serious studies, 
except to those appealing to practical motives. 
Vocational education seems often to have the 
stronger claims on attention and interest. Be- 
cause of the greater efficiency of its procedures 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 69 

it may, indeed, tend to attract students at an 
age when, for them, a further liberal education, 
if effective, would be preferable. 

Vocational education is capable, at best, of 
making only partial and somewhat incidental 
contributions to liberal education, no matter 
how we conceive the latter. A democracy 
surely needs liberal education, widely de- 
veloped, as something distinct from voca- 
tional capacity. The lawyer can be given, 
somehow, interests in music and art quite un- 
connected with his vocation ; the farmer may 
have his tastes for literature, sociology, or as- 
tronomy; and the machinist may touch with 
some appreciation, in his leisure hours, such 
remote fields as the plant-world, or the interior 
decoration of a home. 

May we not, in fact, still find it desirable 
to defend, in a degree, liberal education in 
terms of its differences from vocational edu- 
cation; not indeed in disparagement of the 
latter, as the cloistered schoolman has done, 
but as furnishing the vital complementary 
factors to it? Man, to be of use to himself, 



70 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

and to society, must be a producer of utilities 
of some sort ; and it is folly to disparage this 
function, or to deny its importance in any 
sane scheme of education. But man is also a 
consumer ; he is a user of the endlessly varied 
output of the labor and inspiration of others. 
To produce little and consume much is a char- 
acteristic of parasitical forms of life ; but to 
produce well and consume badly gives us, in the 
human sphere, narrow, illiberal, self-limiting, 
and ultimately self-destroying individualities. 
The modern world insists on specialization in 
productive activities as the keynote to effi- 
ciency ; but it must learn to insist equally on 
the democratization and universalizing of fine 
consuming capacities as a condition of main- 
taining the larger forms of social life. One of 
the vices almost always inherent in certain 
forms of social aristocracy, is the artificial 
specialization of some consuming functions. 

Are there not revealed in the distinctions 
here presented the clues to the methods and 
functions of liberal education ? Man stands in 
a twofold relationship to the world ; he is a 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 71 

producer of utilities, and also a consumer. As 
producer, he writes books, or constructs ma- 
chines, or produces wheat, or builds houses, 
or heals the sick, or conveys travelers ; and for 
any of these activities he can be trained. As 
consumer, however, he is inspired by books, 
served by machines, nourished by bread, shel- 
tered by houses, healed by physicians, and 
carried by railways ; and for the wise and pro- 
fitable exercise of these activities he can also 
be trained. He specializes in production ; but 
manufacture, and printing, and steam enable 
him to universalize in consumption. What we 
call the social inheritance — knowledge, ideals, 
institutions, inventions, all capitalized in more 
or less permanent forms — is at the disposal 
of any qualified user. In a world of specialized 
producers, each person sufficiently trained in 
utilization has for his enjoyment and service 
endless stores of science, of art, of religious 
ideals, of political capacity, and of economic 
resources. 

The world needs able producers, and edu- 
cation to that end will never be amiss ; but it 



72 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

also needs, as a condition of social well-being, 
consumers who can utilize material and spirit- 
ual products to their own advantage, and also 
to the advantage of those who are of high 
grade among producers. Do I buy inferior 
newspapers, when better are available ? I not 
only injure myself, but I lend my influence to 
lowering the standards of newspaper produc- 
tion. Does one prefer cheap and ephemeral 
fiction to the standard writings of the great 
masters ? Not only does he fail to realize his 
own best good, but he becomes measurably re- 
sponsible for the failure of other potential great 
masters to reach the stage of high creative work. 
Do we, as a people, reward with our approval 
and patronage unscientific medical attendance, 
conscienceless political service, and life-impair- 
ing industrial activity ? We pay, as a rule, our 
own penalty; but society is also permanently 
the loser in scientific medicine, in political hon- 
esty, and in genuinely efficient industry. 

Is not the essence of liberal education to 
be found in the conception of man as a user? 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 73 

Is it possible to call a man liberally educated, 
who, as a user, habitually makes inferior 
choices from the fields of art, literature, re- 
ligion, applied science, convivial association, 
political leadership, and travel? Fortunately, 
we no longer hold the older notion that cul- 
ture is inseparable from certain specialized 
forms of appreciation, such as ability to read 
Greek, speak French, recite sonnets, or discuss 
the latest fiction ; and we are slowly learning 
to conceive it as something deeper than the 
mere possession of etiquette and a set of con- 
ventions. 

The liberally educated man of the twenti- 
eth century will not be the member of a nar- 
row cult. From many quarters will it prove 
possible, as a famous university president has 
told us, to derive the training and experience 
which make for liberal education ; and it is 
futile to expect that all liberally educated men 
shall exhibit powers of appreciation in the 
same fields. Life is short, and the world of 
ideals, knowledge, and specialized service 
grows constantly larger. If all men read, we 



74 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

are under obligation to seek to produce better 
standards of reading ; but this does not mean 
that we shall bar from the ranks of the liber- 
ally educated, on this account alone, the man 
who has no Latin; nor he who, perchance, 
may not have read Browning; nor even one 
who frankly confesses a general distaste for 
classical literature. 

Perhaps, in the more democratic society of 
the future, we shall find more satisfactory 
universal tests of liberal education in those 
regions of activity where large numbers have 
social contact. To-day we all buy and use 
pictures — in newspaper, magazine, moving- 
picture show, billboard exhibition, and, less 
commonly, in art gallery and in the house- 
hold ; how much of liberal education for this 
purpose can a more purposive system of school 
training give us ? We are all users of the out- 
put of the modern loom; according to the 
character of the demand, this output may be 
prevailingly flimsy, inartistic, unhygienic, and 
the product of shop conditions which promote 
poverty, ill health, and low morals. Will not 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 75 

right ideas of liberal education insist on ele- 
vating these conditions, and socializing this 
form of consumption? Again, that field of so- 
cial activity which we term politics has evolved 
a form of specialized service for which com- 
pensation is given as in other fields. Voting 
means simply collective employment of this 
specialized service toward the performance of 
particular functions. In a democracy, it has 
seemed desirable to allow large numbers to 
share, directly or indirectly, in the employ- 
ment of public servants. The essence of gen- 
eral civic education is to produce good em- 
ployers of civic workers, that is, persons who 
will have a fairly clear conception of the task 
to be done, and who will know how to choose 
efficient and honest employees. From this 
standpoint, shall we continue to be able to 
call a man liberally educated for the condi- 
tions of modern life who manifests incapacity 
and professes indifference in exercising his 
social responsibility in the joint purchase of 
expert political service? 



76 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

Now, if the conception of liberal education 
here put forth is valid, it is necessary that we 
realize how far the methods of modern aca- 
demic training are alien to it. Not so much, 
perhaps, is this true in professed purpose as 
in methods and results. A careful examina- 
tion of the pedagogic practice (largely tradi- 
tional and customary, of course, rather than 
consciously purposive) of secondary school 
and college of liberal arts will show the per- 
sistence of methods derived rather from an 
ancient vocational education, and ill serving 
the purposes of liberal learning. 

At bottom, it would seem that popular ob- 
jection to so-called liberal education rests 
largely on a widespread, though seldom ar- 
ticulate, conviction that it is not liberalizing. 
Does the study of the historic " humanities," 
as carried on in a modern atmosphere, produce 
the "humane" man, — the man who, as in 
the olden view, saw profoundly, thought 
deeply, sympathized widely, and became a 
blessed source of high ideals, correct think- 
ing, and benign sentiment? Are our high 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 77 

school graduates liberally educated to utilize 
and thereby to improve service in the making 
of books, the preaching of sermons, the nur- 
ture of children, the policing of cities, the 
administration of charity, and the presenta- 
tion of plays? Is the organized training of 
the average college of liberal arts (not the 
college life, since often, by chance or design, 
this is unquestionably liberalizing) such as to 
produce high-grade appreciation and effective 
powers of utilization in the fields of citizen- 
ship, art, social intercourse, religion? 

It seems highly probable that, because of 
the prevailing haziness of thinking regarding 
the valid and practicable ends of liberal educa- 
tion, there is ineffective organization of means. 
What, for example, has the obligatory study 
of algebra or geometry on the part of ninety- 
five per cent of the more than half-million 
high school girls in America to do with their 
liberal education? Some seventy per cent, 
probably, of all boys and girls in our public 
high schools are constantly studying Latin, 
that ancient and extolled instrument of lib- 



78 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

eral education ; but, as commonly studied, by 
grammatical methods, and without persistent 
interest, what part does it play, except in rare 
instances, in the liberal education of American 
youth? These subjects, it will be said, are 
prescribed merely as the preliminary instru- 
ments of a later liberal education; but what 
is this? Are the instruments ever actually 
used, and with what effect? Does such edu- 
cation, in truth, "function"? where, and to 
what extent ? 

Again, the large purposes of science-teach- 
ing, enunciated at intervals since the days of 
Spencer and Huxley, are acceptable and ad- 
mirable from the standpoint of liberal educa- 
tion; but in spite of laboratories and innu- 
merable courses in college and secondary 
school, do not these purposes still remain 
largely unrealized? What, after all, for the 
, average youth, has the prevailing study of 
physics, of chemistry, and of biology to do 
with liberal education? The methods cur- 
rently employed are those of formal voca- 
tional education; high school and college 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 79 

teachers organize their work as if their sole 
business were to prepare forthcoming special- 
ists in teaching, medicine, and engineering. 
Once in a generation each institution may get 
a real teacher of science from the standpoint 
of inspiration, insight, culture — in a word, 
liberal education; but the rank and file are 
technicians only. The popular verdict is that 
science, pure or applied, is not yet in practice 
a feature of liberal education. 

The same criticism applies to other subjects. 
Our secondary schools and colleges multiply 
courses in history. We all feel, vaguely, that 
in history, if anywhere, should be found valu- 
able means of liberal education. But scientific 
methods, an insufficient pedagogy, and a pre- 
vailing lack of social insight (perhaps better 
called sociological insight) have contributed 
to the sterilization of this subject as a soil for 
the growth of ideals, sentiments, and useful 
social knowledge. 

Obviously, we need a revision of the phil- 
osophy and methods of liberal education. 
Surely, no one can contend that in a world 



80 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

growing daily richer in all kinds of resources, 
— spiritual, intellectual, esthetic, material, — 
and in specialized service, we do not need 
education towards wise utilization on a high 
social plane. The democratic and universal 
character of this education must be assured. 
Let it not be forgotten that extra-school agen- 
cies, and these often of an irresponsible sort, 
are always active in leading the consumer 
towards anything but the finer forms of utiliza- 
tion. The Sunday newspaper and the cheap 
magazine become the literature of the major- 
ity; the billboard, vaudeville, and moving- 
picture show give to the people not only 
romance, but art as well ; the convivial asso- 
ciation of the drinking-place is substituted for 
more refined and restrained intercourse ; and 
advertising, which now costs annually far 
more than the total outlay for all forms of or- 
ganized education, incessantly fashions tastes 
and standards in the use of clothing, orna- 
ment, food, and habitation, as well as in litera- 
ture, music, and political service. 

Many of the foregoing agencies are good ; 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 81 

but they are seldom capable of producing 
from within themselves the higher standards, 
and they often fail to lend themselves to the 
wider social purposes needed by the age in 
which we live. The school is the one institu- 
tion under more or less of public control, 
which is charged, in so far as it deliberately 
ministers to liberal education, with responsi- 
bility for the elevation and diffusion of higher 
standards of appreciation and utilization. A 
purposive program to this end is a present 
educational need. When it shall be evolved, 
it seems probable that, in comparison with it, 
our pitiful drills in algebra, Latin, textbook 
physics, ancient history, elementary logic, and 
English composition, will make a poor exhi- 
bition as supposed means of genuine liberal 
education. 

How can such a program be formulated? 
It seems to the writer that the first condition 
is a statement of the aims of liberal education 
in terms of demonstrable utilities, — a state- 
ment which shall consist neither of mere de- 



82 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

scriptions of means and subjects of study, nor 
of vague and perhaps mystical generalizations. 
"Culture," "mental training," "esthetic ap- 
preciation," " the scientific spirit," are all too 
uncertain, too complex, and perhaps, in their 
general aspects, too impracticable of realiza- 
tion, to serve usefully as formulated goals of 
educational effort; and, on the other hand, 
subjects of study, the so-called liberal arts, as 
condensed, formalized, and desiccated by the 
schoolmaster, in textbook and manual, are 
rarely, in themselves, utilities, but merely in- 
struments or means. It may be desirable that 
a high school girl should be induced or com- 
pelled to study algebra, but surely this should 
not be for the sake of the algebra itself; and 
it is educational faith and dogma, not certitude 
and science, which now declare that out of 
such study she will emerge keener of mind, 
stronger in self-control, or elevated in useful 
ideals. As found in practice to-day, liberal 
education directs its efforts towards mastery 
of certain subjects; these are certainly only 
means to further ends, which are either not 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 83 

yet defined or rest largely on a basis of tradi- 
tion and mysticism. 

But modern education should prove equal 
to the task of discovering and formulating, as 
educational ends, a large variety of interests, 
forms of appreciation, and powers of utiliza- 
tion, all having worth to the individual and 
to society. Having found valid and attainable 
aims, it could then develop ways and means 
of realizing them. 

A few examples may indicate what is here 
meant. In the study of music, proficiency in 
execution can be attained by but few; but 
fine appreciation should be possible to many. 
Might not a program of music-teaching in 
secondary schools be devised with the latter 
end only in view ? It is doubtful if we yet 
have any tested methods for this purpose ; but 
these would follow a definition of such pur- 
pose. Again, suppose it were made a con- 
trolling end of certain civic education in the 
high school to produce a fairly definite at- 
titude toward, and comprehension of, the 
problems of the joint employment of public 



84 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

servants: namely, voting. What kind of a 
pedagogic program could be devised to that 
end ? To take another example, what could a 
college do if it sought to evoke by educational 
means, not the scientific attitude in general, 
which is at best a questionable possibility, but 
a constructively scientific attitude toward the 
modern reporting and publication of alleged 
news? Or if a high school were to seek to 
elevate the consuming capacities of its students 
in the field of the drama, would its faculty pro- 
vide for an analytical study of Shakespearean 
plays, or would it strive to evoke fairly good 
results through amateur playwrights and actors 
from within the student body itself ? Again, 
how shall we give to the youth who is to be a 
future householder, taste in the choice of ma- 
terial surroundings — by the study of formal 
drawing and physics, or by the exercise of the 
constructive interests of the amateur furniture- 
maker and interior decorator — the work of 
the manual-training shops ? 

The second condition governing the formu- 
lation of a more vital program of liberal edu- 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 85 

cation, as defined above, would seem to re- 
quire a lessening of the aloofness of such 
education, as now carried on. An ancient type 
of spiritual-mindedness was clearly character- 
ized by its contempt for worldly things, its 
insistence on the all-importance of things be- 
yond this earth ; our so-called liberal education 
preserves even yet some cloistral aspects, in 
its distrust of worldly things, its shrinking 
from too close contact with actualities of the 
present. Perhaps this attitude was desirable 
when culture of any considerable degree was 
necessarily the product, as well as the posses- 
sion, of an exclusive and leisure class ; and, 
just as the modern world is richer, in all prob- 
ability, for the monastic detachment of the 
churches which permitted the ripening of cer- 
tain social tendencies, so, possibly, an exclu- 
sive ancient culture has fertilized modern life. 
But what is here called liberal education not 
only ought to be democratic and popular : it 
is, in forms good or bad, actually that to-day. 
The school may ignore its responsibilities; 
other less disinterested agencies will continue 



86 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

actively at work. All people in modern society 
are being subjected to never-ceasing influences 
■which debase or improve their consuming 
capacities. 

A system of liberal education which main- 
tains old traditions of intellectual or social 
aloofness cannot serve well under modern con- 
ditions. Our academic studies are, on this 
ground, open to criticism. Many of them are 
organized and presented too much with refer- 
ence to their " pure " aspects — that is, with- 
out regard to their applications in contempo- 
rary life and activity. As a consequence, they 
fail to " function " in life, social and individual, 
as it is now lived ; that is, the results in terms 
of ideals and knowledge in action, namely, in 
" works," are not realized. 

Can we not devise a system of liberal educa- 
tion which will find its foundations in the best 
things of the here and now? Literature and art 
are all about us; science and faith offer their 
daily contributions; history is in the making 
to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and 
children, no less than adults, are sharing in the 



WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION? 87 

dynamic activities of contemporary social life. 
Not in the things of the past, but in those of 
the present, should liberal education find its 
beginnings as well as its results. Fortified 
by the resources, interest, and insight thus 
obtained, it can be made to embrace areas 
of culture and power which are relatively re- 
mote and abstract. 

Cannot our teachers of the liberal arts, 
while holding their high ideals and conserv- 
ing their refined interests and tastes, yet keep 
themselves in vital contact with the world of 
people and of things in which their real work 
is to be accomplished? Is any other course 
open to the supporters of a liberal education 
which shall meet modern requirements of 
pedagogy on the one hand, and of democratic 
society on the other? 



IV 

WHY STUDY HISTORY? 

The citizen of the modern state has, as his 
chief occupation, the getting of a living. He 
finds himself, however, a member of a very 
complex society, to the operations of which 
he is supposed to give a certain amount of 
time and energy apart from that demanded 
for his vocation. He has his assigned role in 
the social drama ; but on the modern stage of 
democracy he is in effect also obliged to assist 
in deciding on the composition of the play 
and in dictating the conditions and methods 
of its performance. 

The royal rulers of the past, if they were 
wise, gave painstaking and sometimes fierce 
attention to the education of the princes who 
were to succeed to the responsibilities of gov- 
erning. Modern democracies do not ignore 
the need of educating those who have final 
authority in government — namely, voting 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 89 

citizens ; but available evidence seems to indi- 
cate that they are far from having developed 
scientific programs for such education. The 
public school everywhere makes possible, in- 
deed, the ready diffusion of information. Read- 
ing, writing, and familiarity with books, to- 
gether with the ready availability of cheap 
printed matter, have developed on an exten- 
sive scale the possibilities of collective and 
fluent, even though superficial and unstable, 
thinking. But there is as yet scant training 
and instruction in public schools (and hardly 
more in private schools) that is purposeful and 
scientific to the end of forming right social 
habits, of evoking useful social ideals, or of 
fixing serviceable social knowledge. These 
important educational purposes are as yet 
served largely by extra-school agencies such 
as the press, and innumerable voluntary organ- 
izations, few of which are wholly disinterested. 
Our schools hold aloof, partly from fear of 
invading fields wherein take place the con- 
flicts of partisanship, but also from ignorance 
as to how purposeful programs of broad and 



90 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

effective civic education can be worked out 
and applied. 

But the public is not satisfied with the in- 
adequate civic education given through the 
schools ; and now the schools themselves are 
exhibiting symptoms of wholesome discontent. 
American public high schools with their mil- 
lion and more pupils, including a very large 
proportion of those of our young people who 
are fitted by nature and opportunity to assume 
leadership, are being appealed to as the re- 
sponsible agencies in training for citizenship. 
No thoughtful person can escape the convic- 
tion that our secondary schools ought to be in 
peculiar measure the meeting-places wherein 
should be developed the attitudes of mind, 
the ideals, and the types of insight which 
make for the broader civic or social useful- 
ness. Secondary schools are found every- 
where; they claim the finer quality of our 
youth ; and these they hold during that won- 
derful period when childhood passes into man- 
hood and womanhood — the stage of growth 
about which, from the dawn of human life, 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 91 

apparently, have clustered the rites, ceremo- 
nies, and trials which have signalized child- 
hood's flowering into useful adult life. 

The schools are, indeed, doing something 
toward training for citizenship ; but much of 
that training is incidental, vaguely defined, 
and probably ineffectual. We are assured, al- 
though hesitatingly, that the study of history 
has been given a prominent place in the cur- 
riculum of contemporary secondary education 
with this end in view. The public has certainly 
encouraged the increased study of history ; in 
the face of diminishing interest in the clas- 
sics, and even in certain of the sciences, and 
in spite of a growing demand for quasi-voca- 
tional subjects, history courses have more than 
held their own. Men who think at all believe 
that neither princes nor voters can have per- 
spective suitable to their responsibilities with- 
out the study of history. In spite of the 
historian's skepticism, men will continue to 
believe that past experience must somehow 
provide guidance for present and future ac- 



92 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

tion. Civic ideals are expected to take root 
and grow best wherever the records of former 
achievement and aspiration are gathered and 
made intelligible. 

The popular faith in the efficacy of history- 
study has borne fruit in the recent enormous 
development of that subject in American col- 
leges. It has also assumed marked prominence 
in the programs of secondary schools ; and 
with it are not infrequently linked short 
courses in civil government and economics. 
This interest is primarily due to the convic- 
tion that the citizen — voter or not — needs a 
purposeful civic education, if he is to be pre- 
pared to meet the responsibilities of the mod- 
ern social organization. Religious education 
is now seldom tolerated in public schools ; 
and other means seem to decline in effective- 
ness as a means of the broader social training. 
Such innate qualities as fear and the instinct 
of submission to authority which once suf- 
ficed in a measure as foundations for moral 
and ethical training are not adapted to mod- 
ern conditions of democracy and of the sci- 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 93 

entific attitude toward the problems of life. 
The social or group life of the schools is, as a 
rule, rich in possibilities of habituating ado- 
lescents to certain lines of social conduct; 
and it contributes to the formation of a vari- 
ety of effective, though limited, social ideals. 
Too often, however, the habits and ideals thus 
developed fail to contribute to the fuller civic 
growth essential in a democracy; they may 
even in subtle ways serve to arrest that growth 
on the plane of what is psychologically analo- 
gous to the class, "gang," or tribal stage of 
social evolution. In spite of its avowed aims, 
the American secondary school, in its sponta- 
neous social life, often exhibits striking mani- 
festations of class or caste consciousness; and 
at heart it often falls far short of the ideals 
of democracy. 

A program of conscious and effective civic 
education (using the term broadly to include 
all forms of training and instruction which 
aim purposefully to fit the individual for 
" group " or social life) is unquestionably the 
need of every democratic society ; and espe- 



94 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

cially is this so under modern conditions where 
so large a part of social action must be devel- 
oped on the plane of intelligent understanding 
and above the planes of the instinctive and 
of the customary or the f olkway. In America, 
we have to-day no such program. We attempt 
to use the study of history to this end, but in a 
half-hearted and futile way. We also utilize 
some formal studies of political frameworks, 
calling such studies civil government, as a 
means of direct civic education. Judged by 
results, however, these strivings express little 
more than aspirations. 

But can an effective program of civic edu- 
cation be composed, in any considerable part, 
of the courses in history as that general sub- 
ject is now organized and taught in secondary 
schools? Or is any extensive study of that 
subject a necessary prerequisite to other studies 
which may be more purposefully directed 
toward education for citizenship? It is the 
writer's conviction that the study of history, 
as now carried on in secondary schools, does 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 95 

not "function" in appreciable modifications 
of civic attitudes, ideals, or knowledge ; nor 
does such study contribute essential or valuable 
elements to other studies which may be organ- 
ized in the interests of civic or social education. 

That an effective preparation for citizenship 
should involve study of history is beyond 
question ; but our present history courses are 
shaped along wrong lines, and are pedagogi- 
cally unadapted to the ends sought. It is not 
so much a question of poor teachers, but rather 
one of faultily conceived aims, wrong orienta- 
tion, and the use of pedagogical methods which 
defeat the true ends of social education. 

Perhaps it is not intended that the study of 
history in secondary schools shall "function" 
in the shape of improved capacity for the re- 
sponsibilities of citizenship. This position is 
often taken by historians and by history teach- 
ers themselves j they disavow any such "prac- 
tical " purposes in their work. They claim 
that the study of history must hold a place 
with that of the "pure" sciences, and with 
the pursuit of art " for its own sake." We can 



96 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

understand and approve this view when it 
affects that relatively small number of individ- 
uals who have special tastes and interests in 
the study of history as a means of general cul- 
ture, and who may even aspire to constructive 
effort in this field. 

But if we accept this position, why press 
for the extensive use of history studies in sec- 
ondary education? Does not the subject in 
that case belong to the category of educational 
luxuries? Should publicly supported education 
be asked to address itself at great expense to 
such ends? The fact is that teachers aud 
writers of history have not yet honestly and 
adequately faced the question, " To what ends 
should the study of history be made a part of 
secondary education?" Most of the books 
and articles dealing with this general subject 
are either lacking in concreteness or they rest 
on psychological interpretations of the learn- 
ing processes which should be discarded. It is, 
of course, true, that it is as yet impossible to 
formulate in terms of demonstrable educa- 
tional utilities the aims of several other sub- 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 97 

jects now taught in secondary schools. No one 
has yet demonstrated with any degree of 
finality just why girls should be encouraged 
to study mathematics, or what should be the 
controlling aims in the study of Latin. These 
matters still belong in the domain of enduring 
faiths ; but the case of history study is ren- 
dered serious because of the growing popu- 
larity of the subject on the one hand, and the 
obvious need of a more adequate social edu- 
cation on the other. Because teachers of his- 
tory do not certainly know what results they 
seek, in terms of valid educational utilities, 
their efforts seem to be largely wasted, if 
measured in terms of better citizenship. The 
amounts of time and of conscientious labor 
now given to the subject are great ; but the 
seed seems in large measure thrown upon a 
rock. Agencies outside the school and often 
irresponsible as regards the larger needs of 
society are to-day fashioning the civic habits, 
ideals, and knowledge which underlie social 
conduct. The responsibility of the schools, and 
especially of secondary schools, in this connec- 



98 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

tion, is one not to be ignored ; they must 
equip themselves anew with instruments of 
tested worth and they must learn to use them 
in the service of the social well-being of the 
present and the future. 

History courses, as now found, especially in 
secondary schools, reflect only the most super- 
ficial pedagogical organization. A subject of 
study is pedagogically organized along right 
lines when its materials and indicated methods 
of presentation are of such a nature as to serve 
the purposes of economical and effective me- 
diation between learning capacities, on the 
one hand, and the attainment of ascertained 
educational goals, on the other. What ultimate 
objects are to be attained in teaching to first- 
year pupils in high school Grecian and Roman 
history ? Until this question is answered, there 
can be, obviously, no organization of the sub- 
ject-matter of ancient history of a nature suit- 
able for effective teaching ; nor can profitable 
methods of presentation be formulated. 

It is not enough to say that the object to 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 99 

be kept in view is simply the intellectual 
mastery of so much ancient history. There 
are more fundamental questions : Why is the 
learning of this history more important than 
the learning of other history? What con- 
ditions determine the elimination and reten- 
tion respectively of the innumerable facts and 
elements of the history taught ? Can we guar- 
antee that Grecian and Roman history, as 
taught, will " function " as knowledge, power, 
or culture? What are the native intellectual 
powers of youth, and what the experience 
already acquired which may be utilized in 
rendering the teaching of such history peda- 
gogically sound ? Finally, what are the meth- 
ods best adapted to realize the aims which 
may eventually appear to have validity ? These 
are questions to which the attention of the 
writers and especially of the teachers of his- 
tory have not yet been sufficiently turned, so 
far at least as secondary schools are concerned. 
As respects both aims and methods, the vari- 
ous courses of history teaching are still in es- 
sential respects unexplored territory. 



100 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

Indeed, as abler and more scientific men 
contribute to the writing and interpretation 
of history, the subject seems often to become 
less rather than more available, as a rule, for 
school purposes. History is for the historian 
more and more a record of the sum total of 
those social events and processes which have 
significance to mature and scholarly minds. 
Generalization and interpretation play a con- 
stantly increasing part in the evolution of the 
subject; thus bringing into greater promi- 
nence elements of an abstract nature. These 
are assimilated with difficulty, and often with 
only verbal content by youthful minds; and 
the empty knowledge resulting avails neither 
for personal culture nor for social usefulness. 
Furthermore, both historian and history teacher 
tend to organize and interpret the sources of 
history without reference to the significance 
or applicability of these to the problems of 
present and future social life. However neces- 
sary this procedure may be in the interests of 
" pure " or scientific history, it is inevitable 
that the teaching of history as something 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 101 

detached from and unrelated to contemporary 
experience will seriously and often fatally im- 
pair its pedagogical value and availability, so 
far as the large majority of younger students 
is concerned. 

It may, indeed, with Nietzsche, be ques- 
tioned whether, for the average person, the 
study of history has significance except on 
the basis of a receptive capacity born of con- 
temporary interests and experiences. " He de- 
sires to experience something for himself, and 
feel a close-knit, living system of experiences 
growing within himself. But his desire is 
drowned and dizzied in the sea of shams, as 
if it were possible to sum up in a few years 
the highest and notablest experiences of an- 
cient times, and the greatest times too." 

Following the thought of Nietzsche, it is 
probable that historian's history, and espe- 
cially when desiccated and capsuled into handy 
textbooks, can be profitable only to ripened 
students, possessed of unusual capacity for 
abstract thinking. For all others, though we 
may force certain portions of such general- 



102 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ized and condensed history into mental cold- 
storage chambers, it remains inert and devoid 
of social worth. The mind is, indeed, able at 
every stage of growth to extract from the 
materials of history, as the plant extracts 
from the soil, intellectual and spiritual food, 
if that is made available. Indeed, in the lower 
grades of the elementary schools much has 
already been accomplished in this direction. 
At appropriate stages, the fables, hero tales, 
stories of achievement, and biographies are 
drawn upon to meet evident interests and to 
reinforce and idealize current experience. But 
in the upper grades and in high schools we 
still cling to the belief that highly condensed 
generalizations and masses of dried statements 
of facts can " function " as enduring educa- 
tion in history, to say nothing of any fruc- 
tifying effects on social attitude, ideal, or 
insight. We have as yet only foreshadow- 
ings of a pedagogy of the subject which shall 
make it the handmaid of vital social education. 
History teaching fails to serve as an instru- 
ment of civic education in the secondary school 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 103 

because its aims are undefined and its organi- 
zation and study are pedagogically unsound. 
Further developments in the direction of the 
purposes and methods now generally approved 
will not help the situation. We must face the 
question of a broader civic education anew; 
and we must find for that purpose means and 
methods among which what is now recog- 
nized as history will, indeed, play an impor- 
tant but not a controlling part. 

What must be the character and scope of 
an effective program of education towards 
citizenship ? And what part will the study of 
history play therein ? At the outset, it should 
be noted that the instincts of fear and of sub- 
mission to authority play a less prominent 
role in social control than was formerly the 
case. An effective social control (which is the 
final object of all civic and moral, and of much 
of religious, education) must henceforth rest in 
large measure on intelligent action. Through 
long periods, society organized itself about 
the social instincts; and, later, also for long 



104 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

periods, it widened, deepened, and strength- 
ened itself on the basis of customs and other 
elements of a social inheritance in which the 
products of scientific thinking played but 
small part. But these later ages, characterized 
by aspirations toward democracy, on the one 
hand, and by dispositions toward scientific 
method, on the other, require that social con- 
trol shall utilize in increasing measure the 
instruments and methods of intelligence. 

The broader social education will, of course, 
not only continue to recognize and to use the 
social instincts, but it will shape them into 
useful habits ; it will make and reshape, where 
necessary, these social habits which we call 
customs, and it will seek to make right atti- 
tudes and right conduct customary ; but in 
ways and to degrees hitherto little understood 
and, perhaps, not always approved, it will seek 
to render intelligible the forms and motives 
of right conduct. It will do this through in- 
terpreting contemporary social action and 
through idealizing the higher forms of service 
and of participation in living society. 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 105 

To this end the various social agencies must 
be brought into more effective cooperation. 
Home, church, workshop, playground, press, 
and stage are all agencies of social education. 
But, because these are not directly the crea- 
tions of the state, their share in social educa- 
tion is in large degree beyond present public 
control and direction. The public school, how- 
ever, is the instrument of the state ; and to it 
the state gives residuary responsibilities in the 
broader program of civic education. What 
other agencies cannot or will not do in an 
effective and practicable scheme of social edu- 
cation, the public school must do. Especially 
will it fall to the school to do much in pro- 
moting social knowledge and in developing 
fruitful social ideals. 

The modern study of pedagogy renders it 
certain that the school will best accomplish 
its mission in this field by utilizing in a fun- 
damental and vital way the social environ- 
ment of its pupils. The school itself is a liv- 
ing, dynamic society ; the school is situate in 
the midst of a social milieu which exemplifies 



106 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

unnumbered forms of social activity, and which 
abounds in opportunities for those most effec- 
tive forms of social education, namely, partici- 
pation in social activities, on the one hand, 
and, on the other, observation of such activi- 
ties in cases where participation is impracti- 
cable. 

But intelligent study of educational proc- 
esses also proves that, building at first on the 
foundations of suggestive and vital experience, 
the mind is soon able to utilize materials 
brought from afar. On the levels of compre- 
hension made possible by concrete contact 
with contemporary life, the pupil is able to 
reach out in space and time and to draw to 
himself with profit the contributions in verbal 
and other forms which history, geography, lit- 
erature, art, and the like have to make. 

Thus, the study of history has, indeed, a 
place in the broader social training of youth; 
but it must serve as the handmaid of a richer 
and more composite subject than has yet been 
described in the curricula of secondary educa- 
tion. In ways not yet clearly foreseen, we must 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 107 

discover how to utilize the social environment 
as a means for the objective study of social 
science, as this is capable of being learned by 
adolescent youth. In the execution of the 
programs thus formed, we shall, from time to 
time, and often in large measure, draw upon 
the records of past achievement and ideal for 
those things which will cause our students to 
discriminate, to stay ready generalization, and 
to feel the inspiration of great thoughts and 
noble actions. 

But the formulation of this program of 
social education is not easy. It involves an 
intelligent understanding of the stages of in- 
tellectual achievement normally possible to 
adolescents at various stages of growth. 
Teachers in college and school are as yet 
none too firmly convinced of the possibilities 
of the study of pedagogy ; and their attitude 
is as unsympathetic as it is uncomprehending 
toward the study of such improved methods 
of teaching as must rest rather on knowledge 
of the learning processes in children than on 
knowledge of the subject-matter of studies. 



108 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

Nevertheless, many beginnings have been made. 
The programs o£ the elementary schools, espe- 
cially in the lower grades, offer many sugges- 
tions. Here and there secondary school-teachers 
have sensed the futility of prevailing methods 
and are striving for something better. Numer- 
ous textbooks on the teaching of civics are avail- 
able ; and these show a steady evolution toward 
the ideals of concrete social education. Vari- 
ous sociologists have pointed the way, even 
though as yet uncertainly. A few of the prom- 
inent historians have themselves felt the pres- 
sure of the new demand, and have turned aside 
from their own constructive work to reflect 
upon the problems of secondary education. 

In our progress toward a functioning social 
education in which the study of history shall 
play its part, we must recognize the necessity 
of basing our efforts, except in rare instances, 
on contemporary and local experience. At the 
outset this requires that we shall first dis- 
criminate those levels or elements of social 
life which are normally comprehensible by 
children at different stages of development. 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? 109 

Very young children, indeed, are able to pos- 
sess themselves of those phases of social life 
and experience which are embodied in stories, 
fables, and biographies as currently adapted ; 
and from these, under right teaching, they 
are capable of profiting greatly as regards 
social education. At later stages of growth, 
boys and girls can be led to comprehend and 
to interpret in fairly broad ways a wide range 
of economic activities ; and the insight and 
ideals thus developed may be greatly rein- 
forced by suitable studies of the correspond- 
ing economic activities characteristic of vari- 
ous historic periods. 

Experience will show us that as mental and 
spiritual growth take place, there arrives a 
time when large numbers of children become 
vitally interested in group action along quasi- 
political lines. Achievement and observation 
in this field should lay the foundations for 
that insight which will make the study of the 
political activities of various historical periods 
comprehensible and suggestive. 

Thus, we shall find at every stage of evolv- 



110 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ing intelligence in youth manifestations of 
interests which may be utilized in furthering 
the development of social insight and ideal in 
new directions and to new degrees of inten- 
sity; and to the program organized for this 
purpose history must make its contributions. 
In fact, must we not discover and cultivate 
such interests before we can proceed? In the 
last analysis, no effective social education, and 
apparently no effective study of history is pos- 
sible without them. 

With greater maturity will appear, at least 
in some of our pupils, capacities for more ab- 
stract thinking, and for more comprehensive 
generalization. At this stage, an understand- 
ing of the causes and consequences of the 
world-wide interchange of Canadian wheat, 
Rocky Mountain copper, Manchester cottons, 
Brazilian coffee, and Australian wools will 
give sufficient foundations for studies of the 
struggle for India, the rise of Italian cities, 
and of the conquests of the valley of the 
Nile. These studies, however, may not inter- 
est all; and for those who care for them, in most 



WHY STUDY HISTORY? Ill 

cases, they should be regarded as means only 
to a useful knowledge of contemporary social 
life — knowledge which ultimately " func- 
tions" in control of some sort. Only in the 
case of the exceptional student may we ex- 
pect the delightful study of history " for its 
own sake" to become an absorbing pursuit; 
and certainly nothing in the program here set 
forth will prevent such a consummation. 

The plan of civic (or social) education here 
foreshadowed is nowhere yet organized, at 
least in the field of secondary education where 
it most properly applies. In French public 
schools earnest strivings after a broad program 
of moral or "patriotic" education as a substi- 
tute for the discarded instruction in theology, 
have produced something analogous to it; but 
the French scheme is still in an experimental 
stage and is, in many respects, rendered in- 
effective by the practice still prevalent in 
French education of basing nearly all peda- 
gogical devices on a psychology which is char- 
acteristic only of adult minds. We have every 
right to expect that out of our American col- 



112 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

leges, where education is being studied more 
and more as a science, shall come men of con- 
structive mind who will do for history as a 
means for social education what kindred minds 
have recently been doing for history as a field 
for scientific inquiry. Mommsen, as we are 
told by Professor James Harvey Robinson, 
was able to achieve a name as a historian, and 
yet remain long ignorant of such funda- 
mentals in historical interpretation as the ice- 
age and totemism. In an era of educational 
progress like our own, we shall not have to 
wait long, it is to be hoped, for leaders who 
will broaden the vision of the teachers of his- 
tory and will cause them to see the real mean- 
ing of an education that makes for social 
efficiency. 



V 

THE PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 

The place of the manual arts has been much 
discussed recently with especial reference to 
vocational education. Some recent excellent 
papers also present, with new points of view, 
the bearing of the subject on general or lib- 
eral education. The writer's experience with 
certain administrative aspects of both voca- 
tional and liberal education suggests a few 
queries which appear worthy of discussion at 
the present time. 

Thanks to the developments of the last 
twenty-five years, we have a great body of 
experience on which to draw ; and while much 
of it fails to assist our constructive thinking, 
it lends itself at least to the drawing of con- 
clusions of a negative nature. 

We shall be able to discuss this department 
of education more profitably if we confine our- 
selves to a fairly definite field. At the risk of 



114 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

seeming to narrow the territory unduly, the 
writer asks consideration of the queries and 
discussion hereafter presented, in connection 
with the area of child life comprehended be- 
tween the ages of twelve and fourteen — the 
last two years or grades found in the typical 
American eight-grade elementary school ; and 
in order that there may be no uncertainty as 
to the scope of the subject, he purposes to 
employ the term " practical arts " as a com- 
prehensive phrase to include all such branches, 
studies, or exercises such as manual training, 
manual arts, cooking, sewing, agriculture, 
printing, and related subjects, in which the 
conspicuous element in process and realization 
is manual activity in pursuit of concrete and 
objective ends, which are capable of being 
identified with the fruits of the vocational 
activities of mankind. These studies are, there- 
fore, contrasted with those which constitute the 
rest of the elementary school program which 
are relatively abstract and involve a more intel- 
lectual approach. The following seem now to 
be important problems for discussion : — 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 115 

1. Are not the practical arts, as factors in the 
program o£ studies for the upper grades, suf- 
fering from a confusion of partially contradic- 
tory aims? 

The error seems widespread that the same 
procedures will enable us to realize equally 
the ends of liberal and of vocational education. 
Experience now proves that we can accomplish 
the purposes of vocational education in a se- 
lected field by the choice of appropriate means 
and methods. However, these make partial 
and, often, only incidental contributions to 
some of the important ends of liberal edu- 
cation, which is education, not in produc- 
tion, but in broad and socialized utilization; 1 

1 Liberal education may be defined in various ways, but 
to the writer, the most serviceable definition is to be made 
by contrasting liberal with vocational education in the same 
way that production and consumption (or utilization) are 
contrasted in social and economic life. Vocational education 
is designed to make of a person an efficient producer ; liberal 
education may be designed to make of him an effective con- 
sumer or user. The liberally educated man utilizes the prod- 
ucts and services of many producers; but because of his 
education he uses them well, both in the individual and in the 
social sense. Through the'effective utilization of such products 
and services he raises the plane of his own life ; and, none the 
less, he elevates the sources of the goods and labor which he 



116 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

whereas, the procedures suited to a true liberal 
education may develop relatively little in the 
way of vocational power. The two forms of 
training face, if not in opposite, at least in 
widely divergent directions, as the experience 
of the ages testifies ; yet in practical arts teach- 
ing to-day we are striving simultaneously to 
follow both paths. The results are disappoint- 
ing to the partisans of each purpose ; and the 
practical arts teacher meets the usual fate of 
him who seeks to serve two masters. 

2. Is it worth while to insist on the vocational 
aim in the practical arts group of studies, when 
these constitute but a single feature, and often 
a minor one, in a program of general or lib- 
eral education ? 

Vocational education is increasingly neces- 
sary, and we shall see it constantly develop in 

employs. He uses good literature, rather than bad ; he ex- 
acts from other producers expert rather than untrained and 
fraudulent service; in his contacts he puts a premium upon 
good taste, refinement, and right morality ; and in the sphere 
of more material consumption, his demands lead to improve- 
ment both in the quality of the goods he obtains and in the 
social conditions surrounding their production. His utiliza- 
tion elevates himself and also the world because of his appre- 
ciation, his insight, his sympathy. 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 117 

appropriate public schools, and under condi- 
tions which promote in it real efficiency. In 
the general school, however, time as well as 
other essential elements are insufficient to 
permit the realization of genuine vocational 
power. Efforts in the direction of producing 
vocational efficiency as a by-product in a 
scheme of general education only take us into 
the land of make-believe. We have far too 
much of the resulting sham vocational educa- 
tion in America at the present time. On the 
other hand, the practical arts can be made to 
play an active and fruitful part in a scheme 
of liberal education. Let a boy in the spirit of 
the amateur make a few articles of wood, of 
metal, and of clay ; lead him to try his hand 
at cloth-making, at tillage, and at printing; 
induce him to build on the resulting basis of 
rich, even though fragmentary, experience, 
some comprehension of the social significance 
of the regions of enterprise into which he has 
made curious incursions — will he not, on this 
account, be a larger, more intelligent, more 
social man? Will he not more surely enter 



118 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

into the broad and civic utilization of the 
world in which he finds himself, because of 
the vital contacts thus made possible ? Voca- 
tional ideals, and capacity for intelligent vo- 
cational choice/may come from this wide, even 
though superficial, participation ; but we have 
no right to expect from it much in the way of 
direct vocational training. The schoolmaster 
has erred in thinking of vocational education 
as a semi-holiday affair, in which boys work 
in shops whilst wearing clean cuffs. Liberal 
education for child as well as man may well 
involve along with its more controlled aspects, 
leisure, the following of strong tastes, and the 
spirit and effort of the amateur, as he pursues 
his avocation; vocational education must be 
more serious, more effortful, closer to the 
realities of practical life in respect to the 
hours, discipline, surroundings, and strivings 
of productive labor. Let not vocational edu- 
cation come too early ; neither let it be too 
long deferred ; but especially let it not be lost 
in following the will o' the wisp of manual 
training. 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 119 

A valuable contribution to liberal educa- 
tion can be derived from the practical arts, 
although pedagogic formalism has largely 
prevented this result hitherto; and not the 
least important element will be the economic 
insight, the industrial intelligence and sympa- 
thy which, as Dean Russell shows, can be built 
up around the youthful amateur's participa- 
tion in suitable phases of human occupation. 
Should we not, then, in practical arts studies, 
frankly differentiate liberal from practical 
aims, and quite firmly relegate the latter to 
the vocational schools ? 

3. Is it worth while in the practical arts 
branches to defend longer a pedagogy of aims 
and methods based on psychological concep- 
tions which are being discarded in other de- 
partments of education ? 

The very phrase " manual training " sug- 
gests the older notion that specific and inten- 
sive training in a restricted field would lead to 
general powers of habit, insight, and ideal. 
The idea still survives in the persistent efforts 
of writers on manual training to schematize 



120 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

" logical " courses, to enforce " type " studies, 
and to compel generalized appreciation of 
such qualities as the "artistic" and "work- 
manship." The failure to recognize the ge- 
netic order in the development of the powers 
of childhood is not confined to practical arts 
teaching, hy any means; but such failure is 
peculiarly disastrous in a department where 
we had a right to expect such substantial and 
valid results of liberal education as permanent 
interests in the finer material things of life, 
heightened appreciation of the output of shop 
and farm, and socialized experience in a variety 
of the channels of human effort. Would it not 
be better to take our practical arts subjects 
out of the cloudland of educational mysticism, 
and to rehabilitate them in a world where 
youthful instincts, contemporary ideals, a grow- 
ing range of possibilities of social utilization, 
and the crudeness of childish and adolescent 
powers all have due recognition and interpre- 
tation? The normal child is insatiable in his 
desires to express in constructive activities and 
with concrete materials his dawning appreci- 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 121 

ation of the world in which he finds himself ; 
his efforts evolve gradually from the largely 
purposeless activities which serve for physical 
growth, through those which minister con- 
sciously to the play instinct, and into others 
which foreshadow purposeful efficiency in the 
quest of the utilities of civilized adult lif e. Can 
our courses in practical arts not do more to seize 
upon and work with, instead of at cross-pur- 
poses to, these fundamental growth-processes ? 
Should not the youth whose creative instincts 
are strong, and who is destined to be a more 
or less socialized consumer of many wares 
from many hands, be encouraged toward a 
varied, even though amateurish, participation 
in productive effort ? Can we afford, in face 
of these opportunities, and in the limited time 
at our disposal, to lose ourselves in the formal- 
isms, the correlations, the logical sequences, 
the questionable ideals of "finish," "thorough- 
ness," and "artistic quality," which have 
seemed to afflict the pedagogy of manual 
training, and, to a less degree, that of the 
household arts and the arts of tillage ? Would 



122 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

it be greatly amiss to proclaim as our chief 
purpose in practical arts education, an enriched 
and varied experience along lines largely sug- 
gested by the interplay of youthful instincts 
and environmental influence, not least of 
which last would be the sympathetic sugges- 
tion of the child's teacher ? Even though such 
a purpose were to result in a considerable in- 
dividualization of programs; in the general 
substitution of concrete " projects," each func- 
tioning directly in some preconceived end of 
worthy personal satisfaction, for schematized 
steps in instruction; and in the development 
of only moderate standards of thoroughness 
and artistic quality ; might we not, neverthe- 
less, expect a more vital interest, a more real 
growth, and a richer contribution to the im- 
portant ends of liberal education, because of 
the extent to which appeal is made to individ- 
ual initiative and other qualities of self-active 
childhood ? Granted the extraordinary admin- 
istrative difficulties involved in such a pro- 
gram, we shall never learn how to deal with 
the difficulties in this sphere of action until 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 123 

we know toward what goals and under what 
impelling motives we are moving. 

4. Is it profitable to permit practical arts 
subjects to be deflected from their important 
purposes by considerations of correlation ? 

This query is less pertinent in relation to 
upper-grade work than elsewhere; neverthe- 
less, even here a satisfactory theory of the pur- 
poses of practical arts instruction is confused 
by over-insistence on correlation. It must be 
recognized, of course, that we may yet evolve 
a program of school activities in which certain 
large strands or units of organized effort fun- 
damentally related, on the one hand, to the 
needs of genetic development in the individual, 
and, on the other, to the educative contribu- 
tions of the environment, shall form the sources 
and provide the motives for the specialized 
and often fragmentary activities which now 
constitute the program of studies in the ele- 
mentary school. This possibility should not, 
however, be made the pretext for the artificial 
attempts at correlation often found. Drawing 
and other art subjects, mathematics, science, 



124 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

vernacular language, literature, history, and 
hygiene, all have their applications in practical 
arts teaching, and this subject, also, makes at 
least incidental contributions to them in turn. 
A natural and unforced correlation is open to 
no objection ; but most prevailing schemes to 
that end are impractical, unpedagogical, and 
fruitful of harm to all subjects involved. It 
may be doubted whether even the attempt to 
drive drawing and manual training in the 
double harness of correlation has not injured 
the teaching of each subject. In other words, 
until the Herbartian conceptions of a reor- 
ganized scheme of studies shall have reached 
the stage of a developed and tested program 
of teaching method, ought we not to regard 
each principal subject as involving its own es- 
sential aims, means, and methods, the realiza- 
tion of which can be assisted by a moderate 
amount of natural correlation, but which the 
supposed interests of a unified program must 
not be permitted to nullify ? 

5. In the present stage of educational the- 
ory, can we not find abundant justification for 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 125 

practical arts instruction based on a wide 
range of units, or projects, selected from the 
principal fields of industry, agriculture, and 
household arts, each adapted to the powers 
and active interests of the stage of youthful 
development to be ministered to, and each de- 
signed to make only such exactions on the 
pupil as regards thoroughness, scientific analy- 
sis, elaborateness, and conscious application 
of art and science, as shall prove fairly natural 
and profitable ? 

Men and women till the soil, fashion objects 
of wood, work metals, weave cloth, make 
clothing, prepare foods, print books, build 
houses, shape vessels of clay, manufacture 
shoes, erect machines. In these and other 
fields, applying creative activities to materials, 
they achieve self -development and a beneficent 
mastery of nature. From each of these fields 
it is possible to select units of achievement 
adapted to the powers of youth and tending 
to elicit its ambitious efforts. Furthermore, 
a large number of these projects function 
actively in the personal needs or social envi- 



126 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ronment of youth ; and they lend themselves 
as useful means of interpreting contemporary 
economic life, of stimulating vocational ideals, 
and of calling forth latent powers. Hence 
such a program contributes genuinely to lib- 
eral education, giving insight, appreciation, 
and ideals with reference to broad social utili- 
zation. 

Suppose that the boy of twelve or fourteen 
choose his projects from the following : the 
growing of selected vegetables or other plants ; 
the making of pieces of playground apparatus 
or articles of furniture for the home ; the 
varnishing of a school desk ; the cleaning and 
repairing of a bicycle, faucet, lock, or sewing 
machine ; the sharpening of a collection of 
cutlery used at home ; the half-soling of a few 
pairs of shoes ; the constructing of some steps 
of concrete ; the binding of some sets of 
magazines ; the mounting of photographs or 
framing of pictures ; the preparing of articles 
of food used in camp ; the printing of a 
pamphlet; and the executing of hundreds of 
other undertakings which educational inge- 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 127 

nuity can discover. If, within the capacity of 
the school, and the directive power of the 
teacher, he makes choices, and carries his pro- 
jects to a successful outcome ; if, in doing so, 
he reads, designs, compares, and is led to com- 
prehend such scientific and artistic principles 
as are not too deeply involved in his work, 
will he not have obtained a substantial addi- 
tion to liberal education ? Is it of fundamental 
importance that he shall have completed all 
the steps in some abstract series of exercises ? 
Suppose he has not reached the degree of 
thoroughness, precision, artistic or scientific 
appreciation commonly exacted by craftsman's 
standards — can we not apply here the same 
tests of childish growth and unfoldment that 
we avail ourselves of in other departments of 
the program of studies ? 

6. In the seventh and eighth grades, must 
not the practical arts, as described above, al- 
ways be taught by a departmental or special 
teacher, equipped to give guidance in as many 
of the foregoing lines as possible ? 

There is no other practicable way ; such a 



128 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

teacher can hardly be expected to reach a 
journeyman's capacity in each of the special 
subjects, but he must have worked in all those 
from which projects are drawn. He must be a 
"handy" man, resourceful, ingenious, sym- 
pathetic with childish crudities. It is improb- 
able that any woman can carry out the pro- 
gram described for boys ; and, equally, only a 
woman should give the work for girls. The 
importance of holding to the amateur's stand- 
ards and spirit rather than to those of the 
journeyman must be insisted on. 

The foregoing theory of manual or practi- 
cal arts teaching finds analogies in certain 
other subjects of the elementary school curric- 
ulum, such as literature, music, history, hy- 
giene, practical science, and civics. In the 
early stages of each of these subjects, modern 
pedagogy insists on the utilization of units 
touching the dominant interests, and not re- 
mote from the spontaneous learning powers 
of children. Literary selections which readily 
carry themselves into the graces of childhood ; 



PRACTICAL ARTS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION 129 

songs easily learned and retained ; biogra- 
phies, myths, and historical stories ; attractively 
presented descriptions, interpretations, and 
admonitions regarding the conservation of 
health ; explanations of natural phenomena, 
calculated to satisfy native and induced curi- 
osity ; and actual contact with, and conscious 
service in, the environing activities of social 
life — these are some of the instances where 
the ends of a true liberal education of children 
are being achieved by pedagogical procedures 
wherein logical organization of subject-mat- 
ter, formalism of method, and abstract stand- 
ards remote from childhood are at a discount. 
Each subject presents later steps wherein or- 
ganization along more rigid lines, and the em- 
ployment of the more artificial learning pro- 
cesses, may be necessary ; but the foundations 
of interest, imagination, and appreciation have 
then been laid. In practical arts teaching the 
place for drill, systematic approach, and ap- 
proximation of journeyman's standards, is in 
the vocational school. 



VI 

DIFFERENTIATED PROGRAMS OF STUDY FOR 
OLDER CHILDREN IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 

In attempting to compare American with 
European systems of education, the writer has 
reached the following conclusions, among 
others : (a) In the education of younger chil- 
dren, of approximately the ages five to twelve, 
American elementary schools compare favor- 
ably in spirit, methods, and results with cor- 
responding schools in European countries; 
but (6), on the other hand, American schools 
are as a rule relatively inefficient, so far as the 
education of the large majority of children of 
the ages from twelve to sixteen is concerned. 

The following are some of the phases of 
this subject worthy of fuller consideration: — 

(a) American children go to school willingly 
during their earlier years. The classroom dis- 
cipline in the lower grades is mild and the 
atmosphere homelike. Teachers are interested, 
and usually appear to be equal to the tasks set 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 131 

before them. The program of studies presents 
certain definite goals in reading, writing, spell- 
ing, and arithmetic, in which subjects progress 
is, as a rule, obvious. Other subjects of study 
of a less formal nature, such as general read- 
ing and literature, music, drawing, hygiene, 
practical arts, and nature study serve to vital- 
ize the more formal subjects. The children 
gain steadily in powers of expression, and at 
the same time grow in general experience and 
powers of appreciation. 

(b) On the other hand, in the upper grades 
of the elementary schools and in the case of 
retarded children beyond the ages of eleven 
or twelve, teachers in American schools often 
have great difficulty in making their work in- 
teresting and significant to their pupils. Some 
subjects, such as geography, history, and arith- 
metic, have had their most interesting phases 
presented in the lower grades. After the age 
of twelve, in most American schools, little 
visible progress is made in ability to read 
aloud, to use the pen, to compose, to sing, to 
speak effective English, and to perform the 



132 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

simpler operations in arithmetic. For these 
older pupils, educational goals, as formulated, 
seem to lack in purposefulness. The outlines 
of study in such subjects as geography, his- 
tory, and literature tend to be over-ambitious, 
whilst pedagogical methods employed in teach- 
ing arithmetic, drawing, and the various phases 
of English expression are often unsound. In 
home and library reading, as a rule, older 
pupils continue to manifest a growing capacity 
and interest, but in most other subjects atten- 
tion and application are weak and the results 
uncertain. The older and less ambitious teach- 
ers transform nearly all the work of these 
grades into a dull drill in which routine memo- 
rization plays the largest part. The younger 
and more ambitious teachers seem often to be 
wrestling with tasks that are beyond them. 
Manual training, arithmetic, and history are 
often taught by women teachers who seem un- 
able to make these subjects vital and signifi- 
cant to the boys of their classes. 

(c) A considerable percentage of boys and 
girls of twelve to fifteen years of age belong 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 133 

to what is known as the retarded class, being 
from two to five grades behind the point at 
which they should have been had they entered 
school at the usual age and made steady prog- 
ress thereafter. For these retarded pupils, the 
work of the lower grades is manifestly un- 
suited. A boy of thirteen in a fourth grade is 
usually an educational misfit of the most pro- 
nounced character, no matter how excellent 
the teaching in that grade may be. It is sel- 
dom that teachers of the lower grades are able 
to take personal interest in retarded pupils. 
They have neither the time, ability, nor dis- 
position to deal with pedagogical problems 
presented by older boys and girls. 

(d) At or about the age of fourteen a con- 
stantly increasing number of American chil- 
dren enter the public high school. More than 
half of these, as a rule, will attend not over 
two years. At present, something over one 
per cent of the population of the United States 
is in constant attendance on secondary schools. 
No longer do these schools attract only the 
children of cultivated homes or of parents 



134 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

having ample means. Laborers and other per- 
sons of moderate means now send their chil- 
dren in large numbers to high, school for one 
or two years of education beyond that obtain- 
able in the elementary school. But for those 
pupils who stay but one to two years in the 
high school the usual programs of study are 
ineffective and barren. The first two years of 
the traditional high school program offer, as 
a rule, but a limited range of subjects, and 
these are of an essentially preparatory nature. 
Algebra, geometry, ancient and modern foreign 
languages, ancient history, English literature, 
and English expression — these represent the 
staple program, and their pedagogic treatment 
is commonly formal and abstract. Teachers of 
the first and second year subjects in the high 
school are often young, inexperienced, and 
without special training. The formal courses 
presented in English, foreign languages, math- 
ematics, and similar subjects may be the best 
preparation for pupils destined to finish high 
school work and pass into college, but any 
careful examination of the work of those classes 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 135 

of students who are not preparing for college 
will show that the educational outcome for 
them is small indeed. Not infrequently the 
character of the work presented and the 
methods employed exert a decidedly negative 
influence in the shape of a destruction of in- 
tellectual interests and the creation of distaste 
for all forms of study and school work. Every- 
where in our high schools may be found large 
numbers of pupils of only moderate ability 
and ambition who are being educated in the 
company of others who are destined to go to 
college. The less bright pupils are handicapped 
at every stage of their educational career. Even 
when commercial subjects and the practical 
arts are introduced into high school curricu- 
lums, these subjects are either inaccessible to 
first and second year pupils or else are treated 
in a formal manner as introductory to some- 
thing more substantial to come later. It is 
often said that the rapid increase in attendance 
on high schools is proof of the satisfactory 
character of their early work. There is little 
substantial evidence that this is the case, how- 



136 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ever. The large increase of attendance is pri- 
marily due to social changes and the ambition 
of parents that their children shall not enter 
on vocational occupations too soon and shall 
not in the mean time remain idle. A constantly 
enlarging proportion of parents desire to pro- 
vide a cultural education for their children 
beyond the fourteenth year. They are not, 
however, prepared to carry the burden beyond 
the sixteenth year of the life of the boy or 
girl, the age at which the nature of the pupil, 
on the one hand, and the calls of industry, on 
the other, are apt to unite in effectively ap- 
pealing to the vocational interests of young 
people. Nowhere in American secondary edu- 
cation is a systematic provision made for the 
cultural education of youths from fourteen to 
sixteen years of age. For pupils who drop out 
at this later age, therefore, the charge must 
hold that the latter part of their education has 
been relatively ineffective. 

If the education of American children of 
twelve to sixteen years of age is to be rendered 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 137 

more effective, several kinds of constructive 
action are necessary. Teachers may be better 
trained ; more scientific pedagogical methods 
in subjects already taught may be devised ; 
the active cooperation of the home and other 
educational agencies may be increased ; and 
vocational schools for children over fourteen 
years of age, paralleling schools devoted to 
liberal education, may be organized. Obvi- 
ously, the traditional European practice of 
making relatively more costly provision for 
children of the more favored classes, as such, 
cannot be tolerated in America. Equality of 
educational opportunity is to be regarded as 
a guiding principle in whatever may be done 
in public schools. 

It is the belief of the writer that the most 
necessary changes toward rendering the phases 
of education here under consideration more 
effective are essentially administrative. They 
involve an increasing flexibility in curriculums 
and more purposeful programs of study than 
are at present available. The special problems 
involved may be presented in the shape of a 



138 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

series of questions to which, for the sake of 
eliciting discussion, tentative answers express- 
ing one point of view are appended : — 

1. Is not the uniform program of study now 
commonly obtaining in the seventh and eighth 
grades of the American elementary school 
overloaded with different subjects ? 

English literature, the various branches of 
English expression, history, geography, arith- 
metic, drawing, practical arts, hygiene, and 
music are always found ; attempts are con- 
stantly being made to introduce into the upper 
grades such subjects as foreign language, al- 
gebra, constructive geometry, bookkeeping, 
and special phases of industrial arts. In many 
of these studies, the standards are necessarily 
superficial to a marked degree. For the teach- 
ing of some of them, schools are quite lacking 
in suitable equipment, and teachers are defi- 
cient in training. It is impossible to avoid the 
conclusion that the prevailing effort in Amer- 
ican elementary education to keep the pro- 
gram of study uniform for all children alike 
leads to superficiality, mal-adaptation and an 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 139 

overtaxing of the resources of the average 
teacher. 

2. Is it desirable that in our American ele- 
mentary schools, opportunities should exist 
for the beginnings of foreign language study 
on the part of such pupils as need or desire 
it, at or about the age of twelve ? 

It is generally conceded that a foreign lan- 
guage, rightly taught, can be more effectively 
learned at the age of twelve than later. The 
most conspicuous advantage possessed by Eu- 
ropean school children over American is found 
in the opportunities afforded them to begin 
foreign language study relatively early. Prob- 
ably few American children, as compared with 
European, should be induced to study a for- 
eign language ; but there are the best of reasons 
why opportunities should exist for those who 
have special talents in this direction or for 
whom a higher education is a matter of strong 
probability. It should be evident, however, 
that it is easily possible to waste time in the 
study of foreign languages. Unless such lan- 
guages are taught by effective pedagogical 



140 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

methods, time devoted to this field may be 
wholly misspent. Only in one way can such 
study be made effective. Special classes must 
be formed of those having the ability and the 
desire to apply themselves to the subject, and 
competent special teaching provided. It is evi- 
dent that this can only be brought about 
through the inauguration of a flexible program 
of elementary education for the upper grades. 
Obviously, objection should be made to any 
program of elementary education making 
mandatory the study of a foreign language. 
Attempts of this character commonly fail in 
the American scheme of elementary education, 
and it is to be expected that they should fail. 

3. Is it desirable that pupils of twelve to 
fourteen years of age should be offered the 
opportunity to take substantial courses in the 
practical arts ? 

Every administrator is aware that a consid- 
erable number of boys and girls find in the 
various divisions of the practical arts oppor- 
tunities for expression and interest not to be 
obtained in other subjects. The introduction 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 141 

of manual training and manual arts has ac- 
complished something in this direction. Never- 
theless, the one and a half or two hours per 
week usually devoted to this subject is insuf- 
ficient time in which to produce satisfactory 
results either for pupils or teachers. There is 
no defensible reason why the school day 
should not be longer for older children than 
is found in the prevailing practice at present ; 
and there are good reasons why special classes 
in the practical arts, employing as much as 
ten or twelve hours per week, should be or- 
ganized. Obviously, such courses should not 
be made obligatory upon all pupils, but should 
be alternative to other types of work having 
demonstrated educational value. Here again, 
flexibility in the program of education for 
older children should be permitted. 

4. Is it desirable that pupils of from twelve 
to fourteen years of age should have as an 
option, alternative to courses in foreign lan- 
guage or in practical arts, in the elementary 
school, a course of from eight to ten hours 
per week, consisting primarily of commercial 



142 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

arithmetic, the beginnings of bookkeeping, 
business penmanship, business English, and 
typewriting ? 

Such a course would offer fairly definite 
goals and would tend to produce on the part 
of pupils electing it fairly definite and tan- 
gible educational results. A certain measure 
of preparation for some future vocation would 
undoubtedly follow from this as from courses 
previously discussed, although the vocational 
aim for children of the elementary school 
period should never be dominant. Typewrit- 
ing, business English, etc., are subjects that 
can readily be learned by pupils from twelve 
to fourteen years of age. 

5. In view of the foregoing, is it not prac- 
ticable and desirable, where upper-grade 
classes are sufficiently numerous, to organize 
the higher work of the elementary school in 
such a way that certain studies, such as Eng- 
lish literature, English expression, history, 
civics, geography, music, hygiene, and the 
like, shall be taken in common by all pupils ; 
while, in addition, any one of four possible 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 143 

options may be taken by groups of pupils to 
complete their respective programs of study ; 
these options to consist of (a) a foreign lan- 
guage and mathematics; (b) practical arts 
(for boys), arithmetic and drawing ; (c) prac- 
tical arts (for girls), arithmetic and art study ; 
and (d) commercial subjects? 

As the curriculum of the elementary school 
is now organized, such alternative programs 
would seem to present the maximum possible 
adaptation to the needs of different classes of 
young people. Each program would involve 
desirable forms and amounts of general edu- 
cation, while at the same time providing cer- 
tain studies adapted to the needs and inter- 
ests of those various groups of children who 
would probably desire to prepare for college 
on the one hand, and on the other for voca- 
tional schools and for practical life. 

6. In order that such a plan might be 
made administratively feasible, would it not 
be practicable in cities and other populous 
centers to establish separate schools for chil- 
dren from twelve to fourteen years of age, 



144 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

leaving the education of children under twelve 
to local schools, staffed, perhaps, entirely by 
women teachers and principals? 

7. Would not such concentration of the 
older pupils make possible the introduction 
of departmental teaching, the employment of 
a larger proportion of men teachers, and a 
more satisfactory working equipment for older 
children ? 

In the city of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, is 
found a central school of this character, con- 
taining about one third of the seventh and 
eighth grade pupils of that city. Children 
may come to this school from any part of 
Fitchburg. In it the children may take any 
one of four programs of study, substantially 
as outlined above. It is expected that pupils 
finishing any one of these divisions will find 
in the high school or in vocational schools 
opportunities for a continuation of their work. 
The advantages here found to result from the 
concentration of seventh and eighth grades are 
many. Apart from the possible adaptation of 
the curriculum to the needs of pupils, discip- 



PROGRAMS OP STUDY 145 

plinary difficulties are lessened and a more 
effective contact with the high school is made 
possible. The esprit de corps of such a school 
becomes marked. 

8. Is the plan herein proposed an effective 
substitute for the intermediate high school, as 
this is known in certain of the Western cities 
of the United States ? 

For many years articles have appeared in 
educational magazines defending the six years' 
high school plan. This is designed to have 
the effect of reducing the elementary school 
period to six years. Most of the arguments 
urged in favor of the six years' high school 
are sound, provided such a high school could 
give due consideration to the varying educa- 
tional needs of the young people which it re- 
ceives. If the plan of the six years' high 
school means that subjects similar to those 
now found in the high school should monop- 
olize the program and that teaching would be 
mainly in the hands of young, untrained col- 
lege graduates, then there exist reasons for 
hoping that another approach analogous to 



146 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

that described above be devised whereby flexi- 
bility in upper-grade work may be obtained. 

9. In a program of the kind here discussed, 
what place should be made for retarded chil- 
dren from twelve to fourteen years of age ? 

Obviously, these should not be permitted to 
remain in the elementary schools organized 
for children of the first six grades. They 
should be brought to the same centers as pu- 
pils of the seventh and eighth grades and 
should there be organized into special classes, 
perhaps sharing in some of the departmental 
work of the regularly promoted pupils. For 
example, the practical arts work adapted to 
seventh and eighth grade pupils, as described 
above, might in large degree be suitable for 
retarded pupils, whereas special departmental 
classes in English, arithmetic, and the like 
might be arranged. 

10. Would there not be a tendency on the 
part of all pupils to take the foreign language 
or literary program described above, in view of 
the probability that pupils having superior home 
advantages would perhaps seek such a course ? 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 147 

In some cases this result would probably 
follow. Much would depend upon the spirit 
of those in charge of the various programs. 
Experience already shows that the right kind 
of a course in practical arts would prove a 
very satisfactory alternative to a modern lan- 
guage course. No one of the above programs 
of study should, of course, exclude from the 
opportunities for higher education, but also 
it should be obvious that the pursuit of one 
of them, to the exclusion of any other, would 
entail advantages and disadvantages with re- 
spect to the higher schools. A pupil taking 
the modern language and algebra program in 
the higher grades of the elementary school 
should obviously gain a year in the general 
high school ; whereas, another pupil taking 
the commercial program, described above, 
would possess advantages in taking up high 
school commercial work. A pupil with the 
foreign language would necessarily require 
more time in the commercial program and the 
pupil having the commercial courses in the 
elementary school would probably require ad- 



148 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ditional time in the general high school pro- 
gram. 

11. In the case of a large number of chil- 
dren from fourteen to sixteen years of age 
what reorganization of the currently accepted 
program of study is desirable ? 

In several States, it is now an accepted pol- 
icy to provide vocational schools for young 
people who have passed the period of compul- 
sory education, usually at the age of fourteen. 
We are justified in expecting this movement 
for vocational schools to develop rapidly. But 
in the estimation of the writer, an equally 
great educational need in secondary education 
at the present time is the organization of pro- 
grams of liberal secondary education, adapted 
to young people who will probably leave 
school at or about the age of sixteen. To a 
great extent, the doors of industry and of the 
commercial callings are closing to youths 
under sixteen. Parents are increasingly solicit- 
ous that their children shall have the advan- 
tages of at least two years of education beyond 
the elementary school. The years from four- 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 149 

teen to sixteen in the life of the average young 
person offer great opportunities for a vital, 
liberal education as this affects both personal 
culture and civic efficiency. 

The secondary school curriculum with its 
various programs of study now offers little of 
educational value to the pupil who can remain 
at most but two years. As indicated above, 
the subjects are generally preparatory to more 
advanced study of a general or vocational na- 
ture. Methods of teaching are formal and ill- 
adapted to the development of the tastes, in- 
terests, and insights which should characterize 
liberal education. This condition obtains even 
in the quasi-vocational courses, such as those 
designed to lead to the commercial callings, 
and to industrial arts pursuits. In the so-called 
commercial program of the typical high school, 
the subjects of study for the first two years 
are commonly vocational only to a slight ex- 
tent, being organized and presented rather 
with a view to the studies which are to be pur- 
sued during the third and fourth years of the 
course. The number of students "remaining 



150 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

throughout the course is, as is well known, 
small. 

A complete scheme of secondary education 
should include not only one or more of the 
four-year programs as now commonly found, 
but also, in the estimation of the writer, flex- 
ible two-year programs of study, all containing 
English literature, English expression, general 
science, social science, and an option from one 
of the four great fields of practical arts study 
— namely, agriculture, industrial arts, house- 
hold arts, and commerce. 

What are the principal objections that may 
be urged against the administrative changes 
herein suggested? 

These may be discussed under three 
heads : — 

(1) The proposed scheme, it will be claimed, 
is more expensive and involves administrative 
difficulties. To a degree these objections are 
well founded. The execution of the plan will 
perhaps involve a considerable increase in 
departmental teaching. Teachers under this 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 151 

arrangement should of necessity command bet- 
ter salaries. As the work is differentiated, a 
certain amount of it should be placed in charge 
of men teachers only. In towns and cities of 
large area, it may prove necessary to give fi- 
nancial assistance for transportation to pupils 
attending the central schools, although this is 
not commonly done in connection with high 
schools. Flexible programs of study always 
require considerable effort on the part of 
superintendents and other administrators in 
making necessary adjustments. Nevertheless, 
it is believed that both from the standpoint of 
expense and from the standpoint of adminis- 
trative difficulty, the changes proposed will 
be amply justified in the greater educational 
return which they make possible. 

(2) It will be charged that the proposed 
plan is undemocratic and that it looks to a 
relatively early segregation of different groups 
of children. It should be recognized that cer- 
tain faults common in European secondary 
education are entirely absent from the plan. 
In the first place, no fees are charged to 



152 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

pupils. Hence all of the courses are equally 
accessible. Again, the only qualification to be 
required for entrance to any course is the 
ability to carry the work of that course. There 
is no essential reason why children of poor 
people should not take the longer programs, 
if their parents so desire. In the third place, 
it is assumed that the fullest possible infor- 
mation will be given to parents and others in 
an advisory relation to children with a view to 
assisting them in making choices of appro- 
priate programs of study. Finally, in all pro- 
grams proposed, certain subjects are presumed 
to be taught in common and to all pupils. 
There might be good reasons for organizing 
the classes in such a way that pupils from all 
divisions of a given school should be mingled 
in groups wherein the subjects common to all 
programs are taught. It is difficult to see how 
the operation of the proposed plan will in any 
way involve an undemocratic segregation of 
pupils according to class. 

(3) It will be claimed that some of the pro- 
grams involve over-emphasis on the vocational 



PROGRAMS OF STUDY 153 

aspects of the curriculum. It "will be observed, 
of course, that none of the differentiated pro- 
grams in the elementary school or in the gen- 
eral high school are intended to be controlled 
by the purpose of fitting for vocations. Vari- 
ous branches of the practical arts are intro- 
duced primarily because of their administra- 
tive worth in promoting educational interests 
and in giving the background of reality for 
the more abstract studies. It is true that prac- 
tical arts work, as given, should operate in 
such a way as to further the development of 
vocational ideals and should assist the pupil 
in finding the lines of his probable vocational 
strength. Nevertheless, all programs of study 
are only incidentally vocational. Practical arts 
subjects must be tested primarily by their 
capacity to contribute to liberal rather than 
to vocational education. 



VII 

THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE SMALL HIGH 
SCHOOL 

Dr. Thorndike has shown, 1 on the basis 
of the figures contained in the annual reports 
of the National Bureau of Education, that, in 
the United States, public secondary schools 
which have only one or two teachers are in 
excess of all the others ; while in high schools 
having fewer than four teachers are enrolled 
over one third of all the secondary school 
pupils of the country. In Massachusetts, ap- 
proximately forty per cent of the high schools 
have fewer than four teachers. 

From the standpoint of the colleges, and also 
from that of many speakers at our larger edu- 
cational gatherings, these small high schools 
may seem to be rather poor, understaffed, and 
generally ineffective institutions ; but, looked 
at as the principal cultural agencies in some- 

1 Educational Review, vol. xxxiii, p. 245. 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 155 

what sparsely settled regions, usually agricul- 
tural, where a considerable percentage of high- 
grade men and women are born and reared, 
they assume a large importance. 

These schools are rarely without a few 
pupils preparing for college. The teachers are 
usually recent college graduates, as yet un- 
able to interpret education except in terms of 
college courses still fresh in memory. The 
college, through its entrance requirements, 
indicates detailed and definite standards to be 
met. Hence, quite naturally, the work of the 
small, undermanned secondary school is cus- 
tomarily one long struggle to bring a limited 
number of boys and girls to the point of get- 
ting into college with some degree of credit. 
The test thus imposed on the faculty of the 
school is concrete and easily comprehended 
by the community. Teachers are judged by 
the success of their pupils in meeting the re- 
quirements of higher institutions. None of 
the other standards and ideals of secondary 
education, so often discussed in general, and 
so seldom in specific, terms at educational and 



156 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

kindred gatherings, have much weight with 
the small high school. Its teachers are of 
sheer necessity followers, not originators ; and 
they have their hands full in seeking to meet 
the very specifically formulated requirements 
imposed by the colleges. 

Thus restricted in its scope, it is undoubt- 
edly true that the small high school has 
largely failed to serve as effectively as is 
ideally possible the local community needs 
as represented in that large majority of its 
pupils, for whom a higher education is out of 
the question. Naturally, high school teachers, 
as well as college critics and examiners, do 
not admit this. Somewhere in the past origi- 
nated the belief that for any and all persons 
certain abstract studies, such as algebra, Latin, 
ancient history, physics, and the like, possess 
an exceptional value in unfolding the powers 
of the mind and in developing or imparting 
that elusive quality called culture; on this 
belief the accepted curriculum rests. These 
studies play an important part, of course, as 
tools in higher education as usually organ- 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 157 

ized ; but that, in the shape which they ordi- 
narily take when presented as means of col- 
lege preparation, they should be assumed to 
have other kinds of educational utility, is one 
of the mysteries of contemporary educational 
thinking. Probably an explanation is to be 
found in the disposition of many persons to 
reason according to the principle of post hoc, 
ergo propter hoc. Young people who have 
had these studies succeed better, as a rule, 
in the world than those who have not, whether 
judged by standards of material success or of 
cultural development. But in fact the pupils 
who pass well in a secondary school program 
of abstract studies are ordinarily a picked lot, 
in respect to both inheritance and environ- 
ment. They are those for whom culture and 
prosperity are, in a degree at least, inevitable, 
no matter what the school program may be. 
The conviction, however, is slowly spreading 
that the traditional program of the small high 
school is, for those who do not reach college, 
a relatively futile affair when viewed from the 
standpoint of any one of the three possible 



158 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

aims of secondary education, namely, voca- 
tional efficiency, civic capacity, and personal 
culture. There is a growing demand, often 
inarticulate, in communities supporting such 
schools, but rinding more definite expression 
in circles where these problems can be sys- 
tematically studied, that the artificial restric- 
tions imposed on general secondary education 
be relaxed, and that such education be meas- 
urably readjusted so as to serve more accept- 
ably the actual needs of the community. 

The response to this demand is, even now, 
partially felt. At first hesitatingly, then whole- 
heartedly, important institutions of higher 
education have modified their standards. They 
do not aim to lower their requirements, as 
expressed in the general ability of entrants to 
do good college work ; but they manifest a 
wholesome disposition to let the high schools 
do their proper work in their own way and to 
accept the results, provided only the gradu- 
ates of these schools will in college " make 
good " by their ability to do serious and effec- 
tive higher study. We may now hope that the 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 159 

time is forever past when colleges could harass 
secondary schools by their capricious insist- 
ence on special topics, texts, or time-tables in 
algebra, French, chemistry, and other tradi- 
tional subjects. A period during which the 
colleges nursed the high schools was doubtless 
necessary; but apron strings have been cut, 
and our great institutions of higher learning 
are opening a new era by reposing increased 
confidence in the management of secondary 
schools. 

As a consequence a heavy responsibility 
now devolves upon the public high school. It 
must define its true aims — a thing it has never 
done — and must work out a pedagogy of 
means and methods, towards which general 
subject a not uncommon attitude even yet is 
that of the farmer who, after carefully inspect- 
ing and feeling of the dromedary in the circus, 
muttered, " There ain't no such animal." 
Those responsible for the administration of the 
small high school must needs give especial 
attention to a determination of what is meant 
by community needs, on the one hand, and the 



160 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

educational possibilities of different groups of 
children of secondary school age, on the other. 
The present is an era of opportunity for the 
small high school. Let it recognize its neces- 
sary limitations; let it explore its possible field; 
let it undertake to realize its unquestionably 
great possibilities. 

For the sake of calling forth discussion, 
and as a means of indicating his own growing 
convictions, the writer wishes to support the 
following theses relative to an effective func- 
tioning of the small high school. These theses 
are not designed to serve as a basis of plans 
and programs of action for the present, but 
as fragmentary contributions towards a theory 
of secondary education, which may eventually 
become the source of such plans and programs. 

1. The small high school must remain pri- 
marily a school of liberal, as contrasted with 
vocational, education. Effective vocational 
training in any field is practicable only with 
specially prepared teachers, special equipment, 
and specially arranged conditions. Attempts 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 161 

at genuine vocational education in the small 
high school, as commonly organized, whether 
in agricultural, industrial, commercial, or 
household arts subjects, are foredoomed to 
failure unless carried on in fully specialized 
departments. Otherwise the so-called voca- 
tional training which results is likely to be a 
sham and an imposition. 

2. On the other hand, every small high 
school should maintain work in one or more 
lines of practical arts, but avowedly with ref- 
erence to the possible contributions of the 
subject to the valid ends of liberal or general 
education. Manual training, household arts, 
agriculture, and such commercial studies as 
typewriting and elementary bookkeeping can 
be made valuable factors in liberal education ; 
and they will also make incidental contribu- 
tions to vocational ideals. But it is important 
that neither the community nor the pupil be 
deceived into thinking of any of these sub- 
jects, when pursued a few hours each week, 
as developing genuine vocational skill and 
capacity. 



162 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

3. The small high school must recognize 
that preparation for college is, for a small but 
important minority of its pupils, a necessary 
and valuable function; but it must equally 
recognize that for a majority of its pupils prep- 
aration for the realities of the cultural and 
civic life of the local community is a supremely 
important purpose. It must learn in addition 
that, even in view of the greatly modernized 
college admission requirements now being de- 
veloped, the two aims are not to be realized 
through the same means and methods. In the 
high school the future college student should 
learn the use of certain tools which for the 
boy not going to college will be needless. 

4. The small high school must especially 
learn to serve, and in growing measure as 
standards of living improve, the needs of a 
very large class of boys and girls hardly yet 
recognized in American secondary education — 
those, namely, who will, and probably should, 
leave school at or near the age of sixteen, the 
age at which, through all the periods of civi- 
lization, the vast majority of young people 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 163 

have begun serious participation in the voca- 
tional occupations of life. 

5. The small high school, and it is to be 
hoped the large also, must learn that in the 
liberal education of young persons two quite 
different methods of approach are required as 
between different subjects, and often between 
unlike phases of the same subject. Naturally, 
the provinces for the two types of methods 
shade into each other and sharp distinctions 
are undesirable, even though for purposes of 
description they must be temporarily drawn. 

The first type embraces those methods of 
teaching, the largest outcome of which is 
appreciation. The satisfaction of natural or 
induced curiosity, the nurture of the native 
instincts towards unforced growth in feeling 
and intelligence — these purposes should con- 
trol in this phase of instruction. A child hears 
a story or song, reads a book for pleasure, 
makes an excursion with a friend, attends a 
good play or moving-picture show, visits a 
picture gallery, listens to an illustrated lecture 
on a scientific subject : the net results of these 



164 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

experiences and contacts are new accessions of 
resources of intellect and feeling, with perhaps 
little gain, relatively, in ability to organize, 
express, and apply the knowledge and senti- 
ment thus developed. For lack of a better 
term, we may call the educational ends and 
methods here illustrated those of appreciation. 
The second aspect of method appears when 
the definite purpose of teaching is the devel- 
opment of power towards execution or expres- 
sion of some sort. The study of a foreign 
language should result in ability to use it ; of 
mathematics and science in advanced stages, 
in the ability to organize and apply to further 
pursuits the knowledge thus obtained. Any 
extensive development of cultural or civic (to 
say nothing of vocational) power requires the 
strenuous and purposeful mastery of what may 
be called intellectual tools, methods, and ma- 
terials. This mastery can be achieved, as a 
rule, only when the learner is in a willing or 
cooperative attitude. The high school of to- 
day, by its methods, seems, in all subjects, to 
aim mainly at power in execution or applica- 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 165 

tion, but its methods are as yet not consciously 
pedagogical. The result is that it finds in its 
pupils an absence of interest and an indispo- 
sition towards self-help. 

Of the two methods of learning here con- 
trasted, the first deliberately invokes and sus- 
tains the relatively spontaneous learning capac- 
ities, and organizes means and methods towards 
that end; while the second utilizes processes of 
learning that are relatively artificial. The 
average textbook in science presupposes the 
second rather than the first method. In fact, 
but a small part of high school education, as 
organized, is directed to what is here called 
learning for appreciation. The unorganized 
activities of English and American secondary 
schools are, on the other hand, full of such 
spontaneous elements, notwithstanding that 
such activities as these are often the reverse of 
uplifting. A very real pedagogic difficulty in 
organized secondary education yet exists in the 
imperfect adjustment, or in the lack of adjust- 
ment, of the two kinds of training. 

The writer believes that in, at least, the 



166 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

introductory stages of literature, general sci- 
ence, social science, and practical arts, when 
these subjects are designed for students likely 
to leave school early, the controlling end 
should be deep and varied appreciation ; 
whereas in vocational subjects, in English 
expression, and in the later stages of science 
and mathematics, the controlling purpose 
should be power in application, expression, 
and execution. Until the distinction of method 
here suggested is developed, it seems unlikely 
that the small high school can do much for 
true culture and social development as ends of 
secondary education. It should not be forgot- 
ten that a large part of what we vaguely call 
culture springs from the first method, and, 
perhaps, from it only, but only when interest 
and self-active effort are enlisted. 

6. The small high school must recognize 
that with respect to the means and methods of 
stimulating interest and appreciation it has a 
relatively wide field, whereas in the matter of 
subjects and phases of subjects calling for 
power in application and execution its limita- 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 167 

tions are pronounced and besetting. Lectures, 
pictures, musical recitals, moving-picture pres- 
entations, good libraries, excursions, partici- 
pation in civic activities, interpretations of 
science by talks and readings, activity in some 
phase of practical arts by means of participa- 
tion on the amateur's level — all these may 
prove rich and easily accessible sources of cul- 
ture. But mastery of a foreign language, sys- 
tematic study of literary selections, drill in 
the arts of vernacular expression, laboratory 
exercise in science work, and productive effort 
in some field of the practical arts all require 
specialization of teaching power such as the 
small high school can only to a limited degree 
afford. In power-producing studies, as con- 
trasted with appreciation-favoring opportuni- 
ties, the small high school must restrict its 
field to what it can do well. 

What, then is the minimum curriculum a 
small high school can have and fairly meet 
the above ends ? The writer believes that the 
following most nearly serves these purposes : — 



168 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 



FIRST AND SECOND YEARS 

Non-College-Preparatory College-Preparatory 

1. English literature 6. English literature (1) 

2. English language 7. English language (2) 

3. General science 8. Selected from (3-5) 

4. Social science 9. Mathematics 

5. Practical arts 10. Foreign language 



11. 
12. 
13. 

14. 



THIRD AND FOURTH YEARS 

Selected from 16 ' En S 1 ! sh ^^ature 

college-preparatory ' ° g 11 § 



courses (16-20) 



18. Science 

19. Foreign language 



15. Practical arts 2Q. History 

This proposed curriculum for the small high 
school presents two programs of study. The 
first is designed for youths not seeking col- 
lege preparation, but intending to terminate 
their general education during or at the close 
of the high school course ; while the second 
is planned to provide adequate preparation 
for college work. 

But a further distinction is apparent. The 
first two years' work of the high school is 
organized primarily to minister to the needs 
of those who will probably end their general 
education at or about sixteen, but on the 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 169 

assumption that a portion of such work will 
also prove valuable for those who are prob- 
ably destined for college. On the other hand, 
the last two years of the curriculum give 
prominence to considerations of college prep- 
aration, with the understanding that for the 
student who continues in school without in- 
tending to enter college the college prepara- 
tory studies, while perhaps not the most valu- 
able, are in the small high school the most 
effective provision that can be made. An 
analysis of the curriculum into its constituent 
elements will make this general distinction 
clearer. It will be understood that the dog- 
matic and direct form of presentation is ren- 
dered necessary by the space limitations of 
the present paper. 

1. The two-year course in English litera- 
ture in both programs should be, in content 
and method of presentation, such as intelli- 
gent persons, solicitous, on the one hand, as 
to the establishment of good tastes and stand- 
ards of judgment in general reading, and on, 
the other, acquainted with the strong inter- 



170 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ests and the general learning capacities of 
young adolescents, would design for those 
youths who will probably terminate their lib- 
eral school education at or about sixteen years 
of age. 

We do not yet know in detail what such a 
course should contain, nor have we much 
available knowledge of the methods that would 
be appropriate in its presentation. In this 
matter, our college professors of English can 
as yet, because of their scholastic associations, 
give us but little help ; and it may be doubted 
whether even high school teachers of the sub- 
ject, as it is now organized, with their estab- 
lished prepossessions, can give satisfactory 
guidance. 

It may well be doubted whether the so- 
called English classics should figure largely 
in such a course. It would appear self-evident 
that it should contribute to evident elevation 
of taste in the reading of contemporary liter- 
ary productions, as found in newspaper, maga- 
zine, and book form. It would appear to be 
folly to endeavor to secure, at large expense 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 171 

of time and energy, and with uncertain re- 
sults, abiding interests in fields into which 
the large majority of fairly well-educated 
people do not even now habitually enter. 

Furthermore, it may be questioned whether 
in this course literature should be at all closely 
correlated with the study of oral and written 
expression in the vernacular. The writer be- 
lieves that careful study would show that in 
most American high schools to-day the inti- 
mate correlation of language study and lit- 
erature, such as prevails in the general sub- 
ject called English, results neither in literary 
appreciation nor in powers of effective expres- 
sion. The two purposes require for their attain- 
ment very different pedagogic methods ; and 
it may be doubted whether the same teacher 
should, as is usually the case in high schools, 
teach both subjects. At any rate, in English 
designed solely " for life," literature and the 
arts of expression should receive independent 
consideration. 

2. In contrast with the study of literature, 
in which the controlling aim should be appre- 



172 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ciation, the study of (English) language in this 
program should be designed mainly to give 
power in the arts of expression in English, 
and on a level appropriate and practicable for 
that large majority who are to have no college 
training. Here, again, few if any precedents 
exist. The pedagogy of the problem has not 
been studied because the problem itself has 
not as yet been clearly differentiated and 
formulated. 

3. After literature and expression in Eng- 
lish, no subject has a more appropriate place 
in a program of liberal education designed 
primarily for persons destined probably to 
enter upon practical life at sixteen than gen- 
eral science. This science cannot be psycho- 
logy, or botany, or zoology, or physiology, or 
physics, or chemistry, or geology, or astro- 
nomy, or geography, but should consist of 
large units or topics from several or all of 
those subjects, and all presented from the 
standpoint of appreciation and insight, as 
contrasted with power to use. Little organized 
material for teaching purposes in this field is 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 173 

yet available, and progress will be slow until 
there is developed a vital pedagogy of second- 
ary school teaching. In general, the science 
subjects contemplated should aim to interpret 
the significant phases of the material envi- 
ronment of the youth, so far as his capacity 
normally permits; and this process should 
produce large appreciation, permanent inter- 
ests, and a measure of insight. 

4. No less indispensable to the liberal edu- 
cation of American youth than general science 
is social science, meaning thereby that appre- 
ciative understanding of the social environ- 
ment which is essential, not only to citizenship, 
but to effective living. For this subject neither 
content nor method is yet available. A limited 
amount of civics is, of course, found in Ameri- 
can high schools. Increasing attention has, in 
recent years, been given to history, but the ad- 
vocates of that study in the secondary school 
have, as yet, been unable to show us how it 
actually "functions" in any kind of civic or 
social efficiency. Perhaps it is not intended to 
do so, but the other purposes, whatever they 



174 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

are, should be denned and proved valuable; 
otherwise the subject is in danger of being 
relegated to the museum of discarded educa- 
tional machinery. 

But whether our leaders in history teaching 
will have it so or not, those who can detach 
themselves from educational traditions and who 
are accustomed to face the facts of youth and 
society know that a two-year course constructed 
of suitable units from civics, economics, ethics, 
and other constituents of social science, en- 
riched with vital and pertinent contributions 
from history, both that which is made and 
that which is to-day making, can be devised. 
They know, furthermore, that such a course, 
planned for youths from fourteen to sixteen, 
can be made to yield valuable contributions 
to moral and civic capacity, as well as to pro- 
vide abackground for future vocational studies. 
Teachers for this work are not yet avail- 
able; nor are manuals and textbooks; but 
given the right conception of the pedagogic 
need and method, these things will soon fol- 
low. 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 175 

5. The small high school cannot be a voca- 
tional school in any true sense of that word, 
but this does not mean that it shall forego all 
attempts to keep its boys and girls in contact 
with the practical arts by which men and 
women must live and which are therefore, like 
the earth beneath, the sky above, and the so- 
cial life all about, among the great realities of 
life. That is no liberal education which ignores 
the possibilities that adolescence presents, of 
an illuminating and inspiring contact with 
those realms of achievement wherein men con- 
trol the material world to the uses of humanity. 
In this general subject, contact and participa- 
tion on the amateur's level are the essential 
basal elements of method. 

Under practical arts we may recognize four 
distinct departments — namely, agriculture, 
the industries, the commercial occupations, and 
the household arts. A small high school can, 
even when articulating its work closely with 
similar work in the upper grades of the ele- 
mentary school, carry but one or two of these 
divisions. In a rural community agricultural 



176 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

and household arts training might well com- 
prise all the practical arts work. 

The controlling aim in this field should not 
be direct vocational skill or even knowledge 
designed to be applied in specific callings, but 
rather the broad, appreciative insight and sym- 
pathetic contact which will result in high 
standards of utilization and a measure of vo- 
cational idealism. Units of work, each lead- 
ing to visible and serviceable achievement, 
should be made available for the youthful am- 
ateur's contact with human vocations; and 
these should constitute ports of embarkation 
for excursions into fields of related art, his- 
tory, economics, science, and mathematics. It 
will be observed that the non-college-prepara- 
tory program contains, in the first two years, 
no mathematics, it being assumed that the 
needful mathematical practice for those leav- 
ing school at sixteen can be obtained in con- 
junction with the practical arts work. 

6-10. During the first two years of the 
high school curriculum, students desiring to 
prepare for college should take mathematics 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 177 

and a foreign language ; and also the two 
English branches and one other subject from 
the non-preparatory program. The study of 
mathematics and the foreign language should 
be designed to give direct power in the use 
of these subjects as tools in college work. 
The teaching should be intensive, the stand- 
ards high, and, in mathematics, at least, 
acquaintance with the methods of using the 
subject as an instrument should be made 
concrete, perhaps along lines suggested by 
the Perry movement in England. But to 
students probably not going to college it 
should be made clear that high school math- 
ematics, as the subject is customarily pre- 
sented, has probably little educational value in 
comparison with other subjects which should 
be available. 

11-14. During the third and fourth years 
of the curriculum, the small school under 
consideration can well afford to give its chief 
consideration to the minority (perhaps by this 
time a majority) of its pupils who contemplate 
study beyond the high school. But, if equip- 



178 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ment and other facilities permit, boys and 
girls not seeking college preparation should 
have opportunity to supplement a program 
made up of selected studies from the prepar- 
atory list, with practical arts courses. Con- 
ceivably these might be made to assume the 
character required to produce vocational effi- 
ciency, in which, by a part-time or other ar- 
rangement, half the student's time might be 
given to practical and productive work in the 
calling selected, and a portion of the remainder 
to related technical studies. But this could be 
accomplished only through special teachers 
and modified internal organization of the 
school. 

16-20. Third and fourth year preparatory 
subjects should, in content and method of 
presentation, follow lines adjudged sound by 
college authorities as means of college prepa- 
ration. The foreign language begun in the first 
year is here continued with a view to giving 
a genuine mastery of that subject; English, 
as a study of literature and of the arts of ex- 
pression, is pursued intensively ; while science 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 179 

and history are also so taught as to produce 
power in using these subjects as instrumen- 
talities. 

In this connection attention should be called 
to the preposterous attempts on the part of 
small high schools to teach two or more foreign 
languages. Seldom have such schools the 
means of teaching one at all adequately ; but 
it is unbelievable that so many of them should 
palm off on the public so-called Latin, French, 
and German teaching which is not even a fair 
imitation of language teaching according to 
any adequate standard. Let the small high 
school never attempt more than one foreign 
language ; let it teach that intensively through 
four years ; let it permit no pupil to continue 
in the subject who has not real capacity for 
it; and, incidentally, let the school obtain as a 
teacher of this subject one who knows some- 
thing about it — if a modern language, one 
who can understand and use it. Americans 
are hospitable to shams, and yield to self-delu- 
sion no less in education than in other mat- 
ters; but in no other respect are we more 



180 EDUCATIONAL EEADJUSTMENT 

imposed upon than in the high school teaching 
of foreign language. 

The foregoing hypothetical organization of 
a high school curriculum is presented -with a 
view to eliciting discussion and constructive 
suggestion. It cannot be regarded as a program 
of action for the present time — it contains 
too many features which are yet ill-defined 
and in need of experimental demonstration. 
The writer hopes that within the next few 
years considerable progress will be made in 
testing particular phases of this and similar 
plans. Already, indeed, there are many enter- 
prising and careful teachers who are seeking 
to reorganize special subjects. General science 
suited to the first and second high school 
years — have we not already some foreshadow- 
ings of possible courses in this field? Here 
and there are English teachers who are feeling 
their way towards a fuller and richer utiliza- 
tion of the world's store of reading-matter as 
a means of developing genuine culture in the 
case of youths of fifteen or sixteen years of 



THE SMALL HIGH SCHOOL 181 

age. Even in the ill-defined field above called 
social science, we have in many current exam- 
ples of the teaching of civics, local economics, 
industrial history, and ethics, and in the pur- 
poseful development of the historic sense, and 
the conscious kindling of social ideals, instances 
which show what may eventually he done in 
a broad program of the wider civic or social 
education. 

Can the small high school carry out the 
proposed program? It is certainly not more 
pretentious than many now followed. By a 
proper alternation of studies by years, two 
teachers should be able to present all the sub- 
jects, although, manifestly, these teachers will 
carry heavy loads. But on what other terms 
can we obtain an effective secondary education 
for the sparsely settled community? There 
are various needs to be met, of which prepara- 
tion of a few students for college is not the 
most important. Let the small high school 
learn to define and meet these needs; let the 
makers of textbooks, manuals, and programs 
of secondary education realize the opportuni- 



182 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ties which are now offered to develop a more 
effective scheme of liberal education in the 
thousands of small schools in America ; and 
let educators define and elaborate the purposes 
of true liberal education. The problem of an 
efficient secondary education even in the small 
high school is not an insoluble one. 



VIII 

DEBATABLE ISSUES IN VOCATIONAL 
EDUCATION 

Education is a complex and difficult sub- 
ject. Vocational education — which is but one 
of several kinds of education — is itself intri- 
cate and presents many unlike phases. We 
have now passed through the stage of propa- 
ganda in vocational education and we may 
expect that henceforth progress in its theory 
and practice will come largely as we disen- 
tangle elements of the general subject, segre- 
gate particular issues, and analyze the prob- 
lems into their component factors. Some of 
the problems of vocational education require 
no further debate among well-informed and 
progressive men. But there are other issues 
which still need close study, and with refer- 
ence to which marked differences of opinion 
should be expected. 

The following are some of the principles in 



184 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

regard to which we can assume that intelli- 
gent persons are substantially in agreement, 
or at least that agreement would follow an 
understanding of the development of the the- 
ory and practice of vocational education in 
Germany, Denmark, France, Scotland, and 
America during the last dozen years. 

1. The presence in any society of a rela- 
tively large proportion of skillful and intelli- 
gent workers, and directors of these workers, 
constitutes a national asset; and any country 
permitting a large proportion of its youth to 
grow to maturity untrained as regards skill, 
unformed as regards habits of industry, and 
unintelligent as respects economic processes, 
is thereby impairing the quality of its national 
endowment. 

2. Economic changes and the advance of 
scientific knowledge have rendered relatively 
ineffective such historic non-school agencies 
of vocational education as the workshop with 
its apprenticeship system, the farm, and the 
home. The average youth of to-day has, on 
the whole, less opportunity to learn the arts 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 185 

of industry under controlled conditions than 
had the youth of a century or more ago. 

3. For many callings, at least, vocational 
education can be carried on in specialized in- 
stitutions or schools wherein the controlling 
object is to produce recognized types of voca- 
tional efficiency. 

4. It is in no way inconsistent with accepted 
ideals of public policy that the State should 
support and control schools for vocational ed- 
ucation; and the limits to such support and 
control are to be found only in the effective- 
ness of the work which such specialized insti- 
tutions can be made to do. 

5. Vocational education under school con- 
ditions cannot be carried on by the methods 
and agencies that have become familiar in 
connection with general or academic educa- 
tion. Vocational education requires the evo- 
lution of means and methods peculiar to itself, 
and, to a degree at least, quite dissimilar to 
those found in general education. 

6. Effective vocational education presents 
three distinct aspects, namely, practical partic- 



186 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ipation in productive work ; technical studies 
related to the productive work; and general 
vocational studies designed to enhance voca- 
tional intelligence and ideals. For many call- 
ings and for various grades of natural ability 
the right conduct of vocational education re- 
quires that practical participation in produc- 
tion should be the basis upon which are to be 
built technical studies and the related general 
vocational studies. 

7. Little can be done effectively in the 
direction of "generalized vocational educa- 
tion" or education by a series of exercises de- 
signed to prove equally adapted to prepara- 
tion for a variety of callings ; hence, general 
courses in drawing, mathematics, manual train- 
ing, commercial studies, applied science, agri- 
culture, etc., however much they may seem to 
imitate the procedures of a true vocational 
education, are, nevertheless, usually ineffective 
and uneconomical as contributing to vocational 
efficiency. 

8. The principal elements of vocational ed- 
ucation can only be imparted by persons who 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 187 

are themselves masters of the craft or the call- 
ing which is to be taught. 

9. A rightly organized and effective voca- 
tional education makes important contributions 
to mental development, to the establishment 
of cultural interests, and to the development 
of civic capacity. These are, under right con- 
ditions of teaching, important and valuable 
by-products of vocational education. 

The general acceptance of the foregoing 
principles serves to some degree to define the 
sphere and necessities of vocational education. 
It must be looked upon as a social necessity 
in proportion as, on the one hand, skill and 
intelligence on the part of the worker consti- 
tute both individual and social assets, and as, 
on the other, historic agencies prove unable 
to meet these needs. Vocational education in 
any and all practical forms is as much en- 
titled to state support and control as any other 
form of education. The final test is a lofty 
social expediency. Vocational education and 
liberal education require essentially unlike 
methods, and it may be expected that, as a 



188 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

rule, teachers habituated to the procedures 
of the one will prove correspondingly un- 
adapted to the necessities of the other. Gen- 
eralized forms of so-called vocational education 
are apt to be as ineffective for vocational pur- 
poses as would be the procedures of liberal edu- 
cation itself for this purpose, owing to their lack 
of adaptation to specific ends and their fail- 
ure to "function." Hence, in the promotion 
of vocational education the traditions of man- 
ual training, drawing, mathematics, commer- 
cial teaching, etc., must be taken with large 
reserve. Vocational education must find its 
point of departure primarily in the various 
divisions of the active world of productive 
effort- — the occupations which men and 
women now follow. From these it must in each 
case work back and so elaborate the means 
and methods capable of producing a fairly 
high and enduring type of vocational effi- 
ciency. The final test of vocational education 
is the degree to which it is able to connect 
itself with right standards of efficiency in the 
economic world. To this end not only is it 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 189 

necessary that the principal teachers should 
be skilled workers themselves, but that also 
every separate vocational department should 
hold itself close to advisers who are employers 
and employed in the industry. 

Among the debatable issues of vocational 
education the following 1 may be said to claim 
immediate attention, since the organization 
and administration of vocational schools now 
being founded will be determined largely by 
the answers to the questions raised. 

1. To what extent and in what ways can 
day vocational education and liberal education 
be carried on together or in close connection? 

As long as boys and girls are under the 
direction of the State in public schools it seems 
to many persons desirable that some portion 
of their education should be directed purpose- 
fully towards the end of culture and citizen- 
ship. The authorities in charge of vocational 
schools, therefore, feel constrained to set 
apart a certain amount of time for purposes 
of liberal education. 



190 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

But experience is demonstrating that in the 
initial stages of vocational education a large 
degree of concentration on the work at hand 
is essential on the part of the learner. A va- 
riety of school habits acquired in the processes 
of obtaining a general education are antago- 
nistic to a workmanlike attitude. Efficiency in 
any vocation requires the early formation of 
a variety of special habits of attention, appli- 
cation, order, thoroughness, and industry. 
These are by-products and can be developed 
only under conditions approximately those of 
the workshop. For the beginner in the shop, 
surroundings, clothing, hours of work, rate 
of output, attention to detail, and salability of 
product should be those found in the world of 
practical affairs where young persons begin 
productive work. Any other standards will 
lead to trifling, to dilettantism, and to the 
formation of bad habits. 

Hence the necessity that in vocational 
schools the standards of vocational education 
should control to the degree found essential 
to the development of vocational efficiency. 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 191 

Given this condition, place may be found in 
the program for some general education, but 
the latter must be so organized as not to in- 
terfere with the systematic vocational work. 
For example, studies not connected with the 
processes of vocational training should prob- 
ably not be followed during the active work- 
ing day. For older pupils such studies might 
be arranged to fall outside the regular work- 
ing hours, in the afternoon or evening. 

In an industrial school boys might be en- 
couraged to form reading or musical clubs for 
purposes of self-culture, some of which might 
meet in the evening. Classes might be organ- 
ized for the teaching of literature in the even- 
ing to boys engaged in vocational schools 
during the day. 

It is doubtful if at any time hours should 
be taken out of the working day for system- 
atic training in general subjects, owing to the 
injurious reaction such an arrangement would 
have on the program of vocational education. 
In actual life the vocation must claim those 
hours of the individual's time when the work- 



'192 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ing energies are at their maximum strength. 
Leisure hours in afternoon and evening, and 
holidays, can be devoted to cultural purposes. 
The program of the vocational school should 
approximate the program of action to be 
called for by the working world. This does 
not mean, of course, that those contributions 
which a well-developed program of vocational 
education can make to civic training and to 
the development of culture are to be ignored 
or neglected. In fact, it is certain that a 
rightly organized system of vocational educa- 
tion will do much, as was previously indicated, 
to develop culture and civic capacity. 

2. For what callings is systematic vocational 
education under school conditions possible ? 

It has long been obvious that vocational 
education under school conditions is possible 
for many callings. Medicine, law, theology, 
war, engineering, and teaching have already 
committed much if not all of their systema- 
tized vocational training to schools. In agri- 
culture, some of the commercial callings, and 
such trades as plumbing, bricklaying, electric- 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 193 

wiring, sign-painting, machine-shop practice, 
cabinetmaking, printing, and others, many ex- 
amples now exist to show that vocational edu- 
cation for the rank and file of workers, to the 
extent of from one half to two thirds of the 
usual apprenticeship standard of accomplish- 
ment, is entirely feasible in schools. 

Whether schools can be organized, the train- 
ing of which will prove of value, from the 
standpoint of the individual as well as from 
the standpoint of the industry, for such occu- 
pations as those of the sailor, the locomotive 
engineer, the salesman, the teamster, the mo- 
torman, the miner, and the workers in our 
innumerable specialized manufacturing indus- 
tries, is still a question. It is believed by some 
that where machinery has been much perfected 
and where there is a progressive tendency to 
employ highly specialized workers, industrial 
efficiency is largely a question of organization 
rather than the training of the individual 
worker. On the other hand, many persons be- 
lieve that for almost any type of productive 
work a large amount of training in the special 



194 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

habits of industry and application as well as 
in industrial intelligence is possible in specially 
arranged vocational schools. 

Social questions are here involved which are 
as yet obscure. For example? it may be said that 
present-day manufacturing industries have 
adapted themselves to an existing unskilled 
labor supply, but we have no evidence yet as 
to what those same industries would do if they 
could employ as workers persons more mature 
and better trained. 

Where highly specialized industries are able 
to take advantage of the labor of women or 
youths, evidence is still lacking of the extent 
to which such employment entails a social 
loss in the shape of large numbers of persons 
who become prematurely unfitted for any pro- 
ductive industry and become perhaps a burden 
on society. Granting that an organized sys- 
tem of vocational education might not result 
in the immediate enhancement of vocational 
efficiency in the specialized employment of the 
kind here described, it is yet not impossible 
that it would result in a permanent enhance- 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 195 

ment of ultimate efficiency to such a degree 
as more than to justify the outlay involved. 
Furthermore, training of the right sort might 
enable young workers to fit for other and more 
suitable occupations. 

It is the writer's conviction that in the 
course of time we shall learn that for highly 
specialized occupations, in which no special 
training seems to be immediately necessary, 
nevertheless, vocational training along the lines 
of some productive employment, which would 
suffice to establish habits of industry, applica- 
tion, and an attitude of industrial intelligence, 
would amply justify any fair outlay, provided 
such training were practical and, perhaps, 
opened the way to more advanced occupations. 

In view of our uncertainty regarding the 
extent to which vocational education is pos- 
sible along lines hitherto undeveloped, a wise 
social policy should open the way for experi- 
mental schools. There is no reason why a vo- 
cational school, on a small scale, should not be 
established wherever a well-developed industry 
seems to offer openings for persons of training 



196 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

and intelligence. Probably, as will hereafter 
be shown, the most effective approach may be 
through part-time schemes or evening classes, 
at least for the more mature young workers 
who can thus, on the one hand, have the ad- 
vantage of shop experience corresponding to 
that which prevailed in the days of apprentice- 
ship, and, on the other, a careful training in 
related processes and subjects to the end that 
broader vocational efficiency may result. 

3. What can be done for purposes of voca- 
tional education in the case of both boys and 
girls from fourteen to sixteen years of age? 

It has become an established feature of 
American public school policy to insist on 
reserving the years to fourteen for purposes 
of general education. On the other hand, in 
many callings wherein young persons may be 
expected to find prolonged employment, en- 
trance before the age of sixteen is not per- 
mitted, sometimes owing to protective legisla- 
tion, sometimes to custom, and sometimes 
to the proved inability of the worker under 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 197 

this age to handle the required work effec- 
tively. 

Many persons still believe that the period 
from fourteen to sixteen will ultimately be re- 
served for the purposes of a further general or \ 
liberal education. This anticipates a time when 
the economic necessity for early employment 
will not be so pressing as at present. Others 
again are of the opinion that during those 
two years it will be possible to find some forms 
of vocational education which will lead to a 
considerable degree of effective preparation 
for a variety of callings. 

Contemporary experience seems to show 
that for large numbers of boys and girls it is 
not only economically, but educationally, im- 
portant that shortly after the age of fourteen 
they should find themselves in an atmosphere 
of productive work, whether that be in a voca- 
tional school or in actual employment, and 
that it is the function of the educational sys- 
tem to utilize these years for the purposes of 
laying broad foundations for future vocational 
efficiency. It is entirely possible that experi- 



198 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ence will show that the most profitable voca- 
tional education can be accomplished by taking 
the boys or girls during these years and giving 
them quite specific training for some definite 
occupation, not necessarily with the expecta- 
tion that such occupation will invariably be fol- 
lowed, but for the purpose of having specific 
educational goals and of being able to test the 
efficiency of means and methods followed. 
Persons with long experience in industrial 
training, or in the pursuit of the industries 
themselves, often assert that what they seek 
in their young employees is not so much 
specific skill for the work in hand, but a vari- 
ety of industrial habits, such as orderliness, 
thrift, industry, appreciation of rate of work, 
and other similar qualities. These cannot be 
produced by means of the manual training 
courses now in vogue in some schools or by 
means of the ordinary procedures of general 
or liberal education. It seems much more 
probable that an effective program of voca- 
tional education for one calling may lay the 
foundation for these habits in such a way that 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 199 

they can be in a degree transferred to another. 
We may have parallel examples of this in the 
fact that boys trained on the farm are so often 
able to adapt themselves to various industrial 
callings with a large degree of success. We 
find further evidence in the fact that those 
young persons who succeed in one line of ap- 
prenticeship often rise to a considerable degree 
of success in another calling. 1 

It now seems probable that for purposes of 
genuine vocational education there can be no 
effective substitute for a systematic striving 
towards vocational efficiency in some distinct 
lines or fields of work. Only in this way can 
active motives be enlisted. Only in this way 
can the constructive activities of youth be 
taken advantage of and the strong desires 
of most young persons of fifteen years and 
over to do real work in the world be utilized. 
This may mean that we shall find it expedient 
to take youths under sixteen and give them 

1 The tentative solution here proposed has been seriously 
called into question by some of the most intelligent leaders 
in vocational education. The writer suggests it, however, for 
further discussion. 



200 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

opportunities to procure vocational training in 
trades or vocations that prove most teachable 
under school conditions, in the expectation 
that, even if they do not follow the activities 
for which they have been trained, they will, 
nevertheless, have acquired a large equipment 
of habit and insight which are of advantage 
in many related fields of possible employment. 

It is probable that even where the years from 
fourteen to sixteen can be given to general 
education including courses in the practical 
arts, the latter will, in their successive stages, 
approximate the conditions of productive 
industry enriched by broad appreciation and 
made intelligible by instruction in principle. 

Any plan for vocational education of young 
persons must, while early giving attention to 
practical productive work, also aim to produce 
the ideals and wide knowledge which relate to 
vocations for which preparation is being made. 
Vocational knowledge and intelligence, how- 
ever, must grow out of the conditions of the 
productive work. Therein are to be found the 
sources of its growth, as well as the centers of 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 201 

evolution for vocational intelligence, adaptive- 
ness, and enthusiasm. This leads to a consid- 
eration of the next important debatable issue 
in vocational education. 

4. How far, in the successive stages of day- 
vocational education in schools, shall emphasis 
be laid on productive work, and how far on 
studies and practices, which, while not con- 
stituting productive work, are nevertheless 
designed to enlarge in a permanent way in- 
dustrial intelligence and lay broad foundations 
for future skill ? 

It will be recalled that one of the battles 
that had to be won with reference to voca- 
tional education was the establishment of the 
idea that a considerable part of this training 
must be under conditions approximating those 
in the industry. Hence, not only must there 
be advisory committees composed of persons 
actually concerned with the industry, and 
teachers who themselves have been trained in 
the industry, but also other conditions ap- 
proximating those of commercial establish- 
ments should be provided. Shop hours, shop 



202 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

clothing, and provision that a considerable 
part of the product shall be capable of being 
marketed were insisted upon. 

In the earlier stages there was a disposition 
to regard the concrete or productive work as 
an incident in the process of vocational edu- 
cation. Later the proposal was made that ap- 
proximately half the time given by the youth 
to vocational education should be confined to 
productive practical work, the remaining half 
to go to the related general and technical 
vocational study. Recent experience seems to 
show, however, that during the initial stages 
of industrial training far more prominence 
should be given to participation in productive 
work than has hitherto been assumed. In fact, 
in view of the habits and attitude brought to 
the vocational schools by the pupils coming 
from the elementary schools, it seems desirable 
that there should be a fairly sharp break with 
the methods and traditions of academic train- 
ing. It seems desirable that, even as a measure 
of administration, it should be insisted that 
during the boy's first few months of attend- 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 203 

ance in the industrial school his time and 
energy should be almost wholly absorbed in 
mastering the elementary conditions of pro- 
ductive work. Hence, it seems desirable that 
he should spend perhaps the full working day 
in the workshop under shop conditions ; that 
mathematics, drawing, and such other subjects 
as he should employ in connection with the 
productive work should be taken incidentally 
from that productive work; and that with re- 
gard to dress, habits of work, etc., he shall 
become, as it were, completely adapted to the 
atmosphere of the shop. 

Experience seems to show that, during the 
early stages in vocational training, the funda- 
mental interests in the case of most youths 
center in concrete productive work ; and that 
where they do not do so it is desirable that 
such interests should be established. When, 
through a few months' concentrated experi- 
ence, the learner has fully grasped the prac- 
tical principles of a definite calling, and has 
developed a definite amount of skill therein, 
the time is appropriate for a wider treatment of 



204 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

the subject. After this it is possible to begin 
studies of those phases of drawing, mathe- 
matics, and other subjects which have a dis- 
tinct bearing on the vocation for which train- 
ing is being had, and which are closely related 
to the projects already worked out. Under 
these conditions, it becomes practicable to 
develop, in connection with a somewhat less 
amount of productive work, the studies which 
relate to it, and for which, as time goes by, 
separate provision can be made in classrooms 
under charge of teachers who may, in some 
instances, confine themselves to purely tech- 
nical subjects. It seems highly probable that 
in this way a thoroughgoing and honest 
vocational education can be started. Further- 
more, as the students progress through this 
course, some will drop by the wayside, and 
those who have the qualities most suitable for 
the making of foremen and other leaders will 
continue ; and for these a further develop- 
ment of the more abstract and technical studies 
will be highly desirable. Such a course as 
this does not lead to any loss of time on the 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 205 

part of those who have neither the capacity nor 
the inclination to remain a considerable time 
in the school. On the other hand, it also makes 
ample provision for the development of those 
having qualities and inclinations making for 
the development of a higher type of efficiency. 

5. How far can the economy and effective- 
ness of vocational education be increased by 
cooperative arrangements for part-time work 
between industries and the school system ? 

Vocational education, if it is to have spe- 
cially equipped working establishments wherein 
all of its phases may be effectively carried on, 
will prove expensive. Furthermore, in many 
instances the school will find itself at a rela- 
tive disadvantage in providing the conditions 
of productive work and in disposing of the 
product. 

Logically, the simple program of vocational 
education would seem to be that which would 
provide for the acquisition of practical experi- 
ence in actual workshops, and for the pro- 
cesses of related instruction in schools. 

The problem seems to be to a large extent 



206 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

one of cooperation. It is obvious that in any- 
part-time education the youth's practical work 
should be so adjusted that he may pass on 
from stage to stage, in order to acquire the 
solid experience necessary as a foundation not 
only for subsequent development but for his 
technical studies. But the policy of shifting 
the young worker from job to job, in order 
that he may acquire a wide range of experi- 
ence, may, it is claimed, interfere with the 
discipline of the workshop and its organized 
productive processes. 

Furthermore, it is necessary that the school 
should be in a position closely to relate its 
work to the practical experience of the stu- 
dent. To accomplish this under the school 
conditions requires that teachers themselves 
should be in close touch with, if not in actual 
participation in, the productive work of the 
establishment. 

Cooperation to accomplish these purposes is 
entirely possible, but it is difficult to achieve. 
Logically, a part-time system promises the 
maximum of result in the way of vocational 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 207 

training. It insures the practical and direct 
character of such training. It compels the 
youth to feel from the start the moral and 
intellectual conditions of the industry into 
which he proposes to go. 

It is not impossible that the ultimate solu- 
tion of this problem will be found in a variety 
of flexible schemes adapted to specific indus- 
tries. For example, in the machine-shop in- 
dustry generally it may prove most effective 
to have the period from fourteen to sixteen 
given entirely to vocational school training 
with strong emphasis placed on the practical 
work, that at the close of this period of school 
training some of the boys will enter shops, 
reserving some hours for part-time work or 
taking evening classes for purposes of advance- 
ment ; and that, on the other hand, those most 
capable of abstract thinking will continue in 
studies of a much more technical, as contrasted 
with work of a practical, character. 

6. In evening vocational education, how 
far is it desirable that the program shall in- 
volve topics or units of training that are short, 



208 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

specific, and the outcome of which can be 
clearly understood by the learner? 

It has hitherto been customary in organiz- 
ing programs of evening vocational work for 
persons already employed to confine such 
courses to the more abstract studies, such as 
drawing, mathematics, applied science, ac- 
counting, etc. In later developments, a cer- 
tain amount of shop practice has also been 
introduced, but this likewise has been of a 
more or less general nature, intended to give 
the progressive learner familiarity with gen- 
eral principles. 

Experience now demonstrates, however, that, 
considering the type of worker coming to the 
evening classes, and taking account also of 
the needs which he presents, it may be desir- 
able to organize evening work on a very much 
more concrete basis, and particularly in units 
so short and specific that the learner himself 
may not only easily comprehend their bearing 
on his particular needs, but may be able, within 
limits, to test himself as to his progress in 
mastering that which is presented. 



VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 209 

Hence, there seems to be every reason for 
believing that evening vocational work should, 
to an increasing extent, organize itself in the 
shape of specific units of achievement in math- 
ematics, drawing, science, etc., which have an 
immediate and direct bearing on the work 
which the person is following during the day. 
Machine-shop practice and the learning of spe- 
cific operations might also be arranged for 
in evening classes, provided that the work is 
so organized that the learner may, for exam- 
ple, in a course of a dozen lessons or six weeks 
of attendance, find himself gaining in specific 
power. 

The objection, of course, may be made that 
no general preparation can come from such a 
procedure as this. Experience, however, shows 
that most learners will gradually build up, as 
it were, a series of units of effective power 
when the training is thus organized. 

The foregoing are a few of the problems of 
vocational education with reference to which 
there is now needed fuller analysis, discussion, 



210 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT! 

and experimentation. A large amount of money 
will be invested in this form of education within 
the next few years ; state and even national 
policies will be formulated ; and a variety of 
unworkable proposals may be expected. The 
time is more than ripe for a closer study of 
various special phases of the general subject. 



IX 

PROBLEMS IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OP 
VOCATIONAL EDUCATION 

Within recent years the term " vocational 
education " has come into fairly common use 
as designating any kind of education whose 
controlling purpose is to give preparation for 
recognized callings or groups of related call- 
ings. Medical and other forms of professional 
training, education for the various commercial 
occupations, specialized preparation for the 
trades, and manufacturing pursuits, agricul- 
tural education, nautical education, and train- 
ing for the arts of the household — these are 
all, where organized towards a preconceived 
end of efficiency in useful employment, forms 
of vocational education. 

There is a sense in which it may be said 
that vocational education has always existed 
and is even now universal. All persons, except 
infants, the aged, and other helpless members 



212 EDUCATIONAL KEADJUSTMENT 

of society, have always had to exert some 
strength, skill, or cunning in obtaining a 
livelihood, and for this they have had to have 
powers based on active bodily and mental ca- 
pacities, on the one hand, and experience, acci- 
dentally or systematically acquired, on the other. 
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as 
" unskilled labor," but there is much brawn 
and experience in the labor markets of the 
world which is available for fairly ready trans' 
fer to various occupations requiring only the 
more common forms of strength, skill, and 
intelligence — qualities which are more or less 
automatically produced through the growth 
processes which bring such native instincts 
as imitation into conjunction with society's 
customs. 

But it is also true that vocational education 
of a more or less purposeful sort has long 
existed. The widespread disposition of elder 
workers in all ages to enlist in useful employ- 
ments, first by suggestion and then by coercion, 
the efforts of children is the result of a genu- 
ine teaching instinct. The learning instincts 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 213 

of youth are always complemented, in the so- 
cial order, by the teaching instincts of the 
mature, manifested by parents and others in 
the social environment. The rites of initiation, 
while often religious or cultural in their con- 
scious purposes, not infrequently had an inti- 
mate bearing on some vocational capacity, like 
that of soldier, hunter, sailor, craftsman, 
tiller of the soil, or household worker. It is 
historically certain that the vocational educa- 
tion of the Middle Ages — that of the pro- 
fessional orders (priestly, military, medical, 
etc.), commercial guilds, and crafts guilds — 
was the most elaborate the world has yet seen. 
It was fortified and elaborated not only by the 
customs and ideals of the period, but by care- 
fully worked-out legislation. 

When, therefore, we discuss current prob- 
lems of vocational education, it should be with 
a full appreciation of the widespread historic 
and also contemporaneous existence of un- 
numbered forms of such education, many of 
them doubtless more or less imperfect, inade- 
quate, and decadent. Our discussion assumes 



214 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

the probable evolution of specialized agencies, 
namely, vocational schools, to procure the train- 
ing for productive work which modern social 
conditions demand and for which existing 
agencies other than schools seem inadequate. 
We should furthermore recognize that for cer- 
tain forms of vocational education — e.g., 
medical, legal, theological, normal, engineer- 
ing, military, and some commercial — the use- 
fulness of specific schools, as supplanting or 
supplementing the clumsy, if not futile, meth- 
ods of apprenticeship or educationally unsys- 
tematic participation in the simpler stages of 
the employment, has long been accepted. 

The modern demand is not for vocational 
schools for the so-called professional callings, 
for which, in the main, systematic preparation 
is now begun at the mature age of eighteen 
to twenty-two ; it is for schools which shall 
give ordered and effective vocational training 
for younger learners, — those from fourteen 
to eighteen years of age, — and for whom the 
most promising callings are found in the more 
or less skilled trades, in commercial occupa- 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 215 

tions, in agriculture, and in the household 
arts. Sometimes this demand is actuated by a 
conviction that the present non-school agencies 
are less effective than formerly, both in pro- 
ducing efficient workers and in saving boys 
and girls from submergence in unskilled and 
insufficiently productive labor ; and sometimes 
by a recognition of the fact that in many con- 
temporary callings the entrance of applied art 
and science has been of such a nature as to 
create a need for new types of vocational edu- 
cation which can be procured only through 
school agencies. 

Contemporary students of vocational educa- 
tion are convinced that it will introduce new 
and complicated problems of educational psy- 
chology. The elaborate mechanisms of liberal 
education which have long evolved in custom 
and theory and which are being but now 
slowly rationalized, such as textbooks, syllabi, 
recitation, lectures, memoriter tests, note- 
books, blackboards, laboratories, specialized 
subject-matter logically organized, individual- 
ized study, imaginary contacts with concrete 



216 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

situations, — all these will doubtless prove 
hopelessly inadequate to vocational education 
under school conditions, even though the per- 
sistent character of these mechanisms will 
constantly tend to be manifest. It is doubt- 
ful also, whether satisfactory precedents for 
method and organization of vocational educa- 
tion in the common occupations, with their 
large emphasis on skill, can be obtained from 
vocational schools preparing for the profes- 
sions, partly because of the relatively academic 
character of professional education and partly 
because of the unusual type of mind found in 
the student qualified for and electing to pur- 
sue professional study. 

The most fundamental problem in voca- 
tional education is that which relates to the 
place in such training to be occupied by actual 
participation in the processes of the occupa- 
tion itself. The older forms of vocational edu- 
cation were based largely on such participation. 
The boy became a hunter by hunting, a weaver 
by taking the simpler tasks with his master, a 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 217 

tiller of the soil by gradually absorbing knowl- 
edge and evolving skill as a co-worker with 
father or employer. But we now clearly recog- 
nize that certain forms of vocational power 
and flexibility are acquired with difficulty, if 
at all, under an apprenticeship system resting 
mainly on the psychological foundations of 
imitation and suggestion. These limitations 
are more acutely felt in proportion as, on the 
one hand, industry becomes departmentalized, 
and, on the other, as art and science become 
more purposefully applied. Herein is found 
the second large problem of vocational edu- 
cation. The workshop alone may give the 
prospective machinist skill in tool manipu- 
lation, but it cannot give in any effective 
way the mastery of drawing, of mechanics, 
of mathematics, of industrial economics, and 
of industrial hygiene, without which he has 
but limited capacity for growth or for play- 
ing any satisfactory role as citizen and mas- 
ter of his own destinies. The ordinary farm 
as an educational institution can give little 
of the science which the modern world places 



218 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

at the disposal of the properly taught tiller of 
the soil. 

In fact, in nearly all vocations there may be 
distinguished two types of elements, namely, 
skill and other products of direct experience 
in the occupation itself, and, in addition, cer- 
tain types of knowledge, ideal, and power hav- 
ing form and content outside the specific 
occupation, but capable of application to it. 
The student of stenography learns English 
only to a slight degree in the study of stenog- 
raphy, but good English is essential to that 
calling and must be acquired either previous 
to, simultaneously with, or subsequent to the 
acquisition of skill in stenography. The car- 
penter needs drawing and certain forms of 
mathematics in his craft; the cabinetmaker 
needs design; the homemaker, various forms 
of science, such as bacteriology and chemistry, 
to say nothing of applied art ; and the farmer 
needs economics, soil physics, and bookkeep- 
ing as tools of his calling. 

Now, since it would appear that the intel- 
lectually prehensile powers of the youthful 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 219 

mind are great and active, it is natural for an 
unreflecting pedagogy to seek the mastery of 
these more intellectual elements of vocational 
efficiency in advance of the youth's entry on 
the serious and more direct pursuit of his call- 
ing. Is drawing a useful tool to the mechanic, 
the weaver, the commercial traveler, and even 
to the farmer and the homemaker? Teach 
drawing, then, to youth in advance of his be- 
ing summoned to the practical school of ap- 
prenticeship. Should the modern contributions 
of bacteriology be at the disposal of the farmer, 
the nurse, the food-packer, and the housewife ? 
Teach bacteriology in the schools, say educa- 
tional theorists, and thereby accomplish an 
important part of vocational training. 

This method of approach, indeed, has been 
largely characteristic of those higher forms of 
vocational education called professional. The 
prospective engineer is first drilled in general 
mathematics, drawing, and other more or less 
logically organized fields of special knowledge 
and, occasionally, skill. The prospective med- 
ical practitioner first gives his attention to gen- 



220 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

eral chemistry, biology, and physiology. The 
teacher's first year in the normal school is 
given to psychology, history of education, 
and other "basal" subjects. 

It is not certain, of course, that even in 
professional education the above pedagogic 
order is the most effective. It may only be 
the one most available under existing condi- 
tions in professional schools and of educa- 
tional tradition. Even now we see legal educa- 
tion substituting the " case method " for the 
dreary introductions through Blackstone and 
other purveyors of " fundamental principles." 
Dissecting-room, clinic, and hospital appren- 
ticeship seem to play a larger part than for- 
merly in legitimate medical education, and a 
metropolitan university now proposes to make 
actual service in water and milk analysis and 
other municipal activities in sanitation a rec- 
ognized part of the training of those who are 
later to practice the arts of healing and of 
disease prevention. Laboratory, workshop, 
and summer camp are being more extensively 
employed in training engineers, and it would 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 221 

appear that, barring here and there a defender 
of the old order, the professors in engineering 
colleges are attaching less importance, rela- 
tively, to the extensive preliminary study by 
their students of pure mathematics, pure 
science, and other " theoretical " subjects. 

But whatever the case in professional edu- 
cation, there can be little question as to the 
futility, in the vocational education of youths 
from fourteen to eighteen years of age for the 
common occupations of life, of a pedagogy 
based on an initial mastery of the more in- 
tellectual elements of vocation. Experience 
has already revealed many impediments to the 
process. Neither motive nor ability, as found 
in such youths, is sufficient to enable them to 
master the fundamentals in science and art 
preliminary to the application of these in vo- 
cation. Professional students, as a rule, be- 
long to an intellectually select class, distin- 
guished largely by its capacity for abstract 
thinking and constructive imagination. Every 
step in the boy's " running the gantlet " from 
the primary school to the doors of the pro- 



222 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

fessional school is designed to discover and 
promote these qualities. But the typical 
worker in the wage-earning callings is distin- 
guished by his " concreteness " of mind. Skill 
in execution, not grasp of principles, is the 
demand made upon him by his nature, his 
surroundings, and the idealism of his calling. 
He can utilize, not the principal contributions 
of the sciences and arts, but important sections 
and suggestions, here and there, from them. 
The loom-fixer, the machinist, the farmer, the 
bookkeeper, and the chainman are greatly in 
need of certain specific helps from mathemat- 
ics. Neither time, capacity, nor inclination 
permit them to seek their necessary needles in 
the haystack of general mathematics ; they de- 
sire to leave the winnowing process to special- 
ists (perhaps schoolmasters) with time and 
capacity for that sort of work. The farmer 
cannot be meteorologist, chemist, and biologist, 
but he needs certain " derivative products " 
from those sciences badly, and he claims that 
his vocational education should put him in 
possession of them. In the great majority of 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 223 

everyday vocations, taking account of the 
qualities of those who are to follow them, the 
system of providing in advance the "intel- 
lectual" as contrasted with the "experiential" 
elements seems destined to failure. Some 
educators of shrewd insight suspect that this 
may also prove true in " general " or " liberal" 
education ; but, whatever the event may show 
in that field, we are now compelled to assume 
that effective vocational education requires 
a pedagogy in which the results of practical 
experience in a calling shall be closely interre- 
lated with processes designed to procure suffi- 
cient grasp of the more intellectual elements. 
This constitutes the basis of the several large 
problems of an educational psychology of 
vocational education. 

Vocational education must either provide, 
or intimately relate itself to, the acquisition 
of practical experience, and it must discover 
ways of adding thereto the more intellectual 
elements without relying on the logical organ- 
ization and external and detached character 
of the subjects making these contributions. 



224 EDUCATIONAL KEADJUSTMENT 

Theoretically considered, from the stand- 
points both of economy and of efficiency, it 
would seem that the most promising method 
of organizing true vocational education would 
be to allow the workshop, the farm, the com- 
mercial establishment, and the household to 
continue their historic educational function, 
namely, that of providing by actual work un- 
der normal conditions of employment the 
"experiential" basis, the vocational school, 
so-called, coming in to supplement with the 
appropriate "intellectual" elements. This 
arrangement, indeed, is that contemplated by 
the so-called "part-time" or "continuation" 
type of vocational training. The vocational 
evening school also exemplifies the application 
of this principle to the needs of more mature 
students. In practice, the weakness of joint 
or "cooperative" programs of vocational edu- 
cation of this sort is their lack of integration. 
The practical experience acquired in the work- 
shop — here used as a general term for any 
place where actual experience in productive 
work is had under conditions commercially 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 225 

characteristic of the occupation — is likely to 
be specialized and without educational se- 
quence or organization. The school work is 
prone to develop a theoretic organization, with 
the result that its returns in knowledge, spe- 
cialized skill, etc., may be more or less per- 
manently placed in mental cold storage. Much 
evening instruction is o£ this " non-function- 
ing" character; only the rare student can 
bridge the gap and carry his freightage of 
theory into application. 

Even when we shall have reached a full 
social realization of the law that the plastic 
years of youth should be at least partly re- 
served for learning, and when employers and 
teachers shall have learned to cooperate in 
arranging that practical and productive work 
shall be made to contribute its best educational 
results, it may prove necessary in certain vo- 
cational fields to bring a workshop into the 
school in order to obtain a proper integration 
of practical and theoretic elements in voca- 
tional training. In the making of the stenog- 
rapher, for example, this is now done, because 



226 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

commercial " shop " conditions cannot tolerate 
the mere learner. In a hundred other direc- 
tions this may also prove to be the case. 

We shall have to turn eventually to edu- 
cational psychology to assist us in organizing 
this practical work so as to get a working re- 
sultant between standards of skill, on the one 
hand, and extent of ground to be covered, on 
the other. How long shall the learning ma- 
chinist use one tool in a single type of opera- 
tion ? Until he has skill and speed equal to 
the commercial demand, or only until he has 
a sufficient basis of experience to enable him 
to grasp the related supplemental studies 
and to start "right" in his later shop work? 
Only a scientific study of the problem by edu- 
cators appreciative of the meaning of "indus- 
trial efficiency in the long run " can tell. 
In the mean time, without prejudice to what 
educational psychology and commercial de- 
mand may eventually prove to be the valid 
method, it is the privilege, if not the duty, of 
vocational teachers and of employers to con- 
tinue to guess to the best of their ability. 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 227 

But a still more serious problem for educa- 
tional psychology is to be found in the 
" method " of organizing and presenting the 
more intellectual elements of the various vo- 
cations to young learners. Ages of experience 
in apprenticeship should have given us many 
clues to the organization of the practical side 
of the student's program. Schools of liberal 
education long ago established logical orders 
of subject-matter organization in the theo- 
retic fields of the sciences, arts, and histories 
upon which vocational education must draw. 
But, as already indicated, experience shows 
that we cannot utilize these subjects as now 
organized in the training of the rank and file 
of workers. Few, if any, precedents yet exist 
for the organization of programs of study and 
practice in the more intellectual phases of 
vocational training. Tell a machine-shop in- 
structor not to require of his pupils a system- 
atic course in mechanical drawing, but to 
base a series of drawing lessons on the prac- 
tical work which his pupils are doing from 
day to day, and he complains that they " must 



228 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

first learn the principles." Tell a normal- 
school teacher that the best psychology of 
education, at least for normal-school young 
women, should probably grow out of and be 
built upon their daily problems of teaching, 
and he or she, too, will raise embarrassing 
questions as to terminology and " general 
principles," and will conclude by asking if 
any authoritative textbook exemplifies the 
" new method." Ask a teacher in an agricul- 
tural school, whose boys may be doing very 
practical and even scientific work (the result 
of suggestion), in growing corn and raising 
poultry, to forego the teaching of systematic 
chemistry, botany, physics, bacteriology, etc., 
in favor of " agricultural science," and he will 
look dazed, while forlornly and helplessly set- 
ting to work to do as he is asked. We are re- 
quiring these teachers to construct a new type 
of pedagogical material. Except in the pri- 
mary school, educational psychology hardly 
furnishes even the help of analogous situa- 
tions. Nevertheless, in the vocational school 
claiming to be effective we must fight persist- 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 229 

ently for a new pedagogic organization of 
subject-matter wherein practice must form 
the groundwork and point of departure for 
the more theoretic studies. Ideally, we are 
seeking a program wherein concrete and vital 
experience, gradually interpreted and illu- 
minated into a unity of skill and comprehension 
of principles in their application to the calling, 
shall be the outcome of vocational education. 
We dare not in genuine vocational education 
content ourselves, on the practical side of such 
training, with the fool's paradise of imitation 
and sham participation in the real work of 
life, such as manual training exercises, the 
sprouting of a few seeds, the embroidering of 
doilies, the making of pastries, and amateur- 
ish dabbling with typewriting and bookkeep- 
ing, nor shall we find in systematized mathe- 
matics, drawing, chemistry, economics, and 
kindred subjects the forms of organization 
and methods of presentation adapted to the 
need of our pupils. We are face to face with a 
new department of education, largely a modern 
development, wherein we have no more science 



230 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

to guide us than in other departments and 
vastly less of tradition. 

It may be hoped that because we have such a 
paucity of tradition progress will be the more 
rapid. If we could persuade a few investigators 
to take this as their field, such might be the 
case. Unfortunately, the harried teachers in 
our vocational schools can give little time to 
constructive programs, although it is hard to 
see how they can succeed in their work until 
they shall have accomplished something in 
this direction. The administrative authorities 
of such schools have their problems in forcing 
a place for the practical work and in prevent- 
ing a relapse into the stereotyped pedagogical 
methods evolved in the ages of bookish sec- 
ondary education — an education which has 
rarely discovered, much less studied, the learner, 
but the votaries of which, like Hindoo mystics, 
contemplative of their bodies, have focused 
their attention on subject-matter until self- 
hypnotization has rendered them oblivious to 
the world of external actualities. 



PROBLEMS IN PSYCHOLOGY 231 

We may summarize, then, as follows: — 

1. Vocational education is a distinctive 
type of education, especially when promoted 
under school conditions. It presents distinctive 
new problems to the educational psychologist. 

2. Present experience seems to demonstrate 
that a large — perhaps major — place must 
be given in vocational education to productive 
work, graduated by stages, in the occupations 
themselves. Historic experience may assist in 
shaping the programs of this work, but ulti- 
mately careful experimental studies of the 
processes by which skill — flexible and capa- 
ble of growth — may be developed, must be 
made. 

3. Skill and other products of direct expe- 
riential contact with vocational situations con- 
stitute a considerable part of a complete voca- 
tional education, but a no less important part 
will be found in the knowledge, auxiliary 
forms of skill, and ideals which function in 
the larger, more flexible, and more prolonged 
vocational efficiency. For education in these 
latter elements in the case of youths of four- 



232 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

teen to eighteen years of age, existing peda- 
gogic processes, whether scientific or custom- 
ary, offer as yet little assistance. This is 
peculiarly a field for constructive scientific 
study. 



CENTRALIZED VS. LOCALIZED ADMINISTRA- 
TION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION 

Localized and democratic administration 
of public education is characterized by the fol- 
lowing qualities : The constitution of the State 
authorizes and establishes public instruction 
only in most general terms ; State legislation 
regarding it is not specific, and is largely per- 
missive; schools and school systems are ad- 
ministered and supervised mainly by laymen 
holding office for short periods and quite re- 
sponsive to public opinion ; the areas of admin- 
istration for important functions are small, such 
as districts, or wards of cities ; town meetings 
or public elections are competent to decide a 
variety of administrative questions, such as ap- 
propriating money, selecting textbooks, locat- 
ing schoolhouses, and deciding on new types of 
education; and State officials have mainly advis- 
ory powers, or at most certain powers of veto. 



234 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

Centralized administration, on the other 
hand, exhibits the following characteristics : 
The State constitution fixes many administra- 
tive details, such as types of schools that may 
be permitted, maximum tax levies that may be 
imposed, methods to be employed in distribut- 
ing funds, and qualifications and compensa- 
tions for certain offices ; the State legislature, 
by statute and by its control of municipal gov- 
ernment, regulates a variety of the details of 
administration, thus reducing the possibilities 
of initiative and variation in the local com- 
munity; administrative functions are trans- 
ferred from the smaller to the larger areas, as 
when certification of teachers, selection of text- 
books, formation of courses of study, inspec- 
tion of schools, conduct of institutes, and other 
administrative functions become the duties of 
State officials, or when the district or the part 
of the city has to yield its authority to the 
county or to the consolidated city; popular 
meetings and elections diminish in number and 
effectiveness, their powers being conveyed to 
representative boards ; lay boards decrease in 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 235 

size, their members are appointed rather than 
elected, and the members' terms of office are 
prolonged, thus removing them from the im- 
mediate control of the popular will ; under the 
lay boards appear experts whose functions 
increase at the expense of the board, whose 
tenure becomes relatively secure, and who are 
not necessarily representative of, or informed 
with regard to, the local opinion and will. 

The history of American education shows 
that centralization in one form or another has 
been a progressive tendency for more than 
half a century in nearly all the States of the 
Union. This movement is parallel to a similar 
evolution which has taken place in almost all 
other departments of social economy, such as 
business, government, charity and philan- 
thropy, research, etc. At bottom it is a prod- 
uct of two factors : the demand for efficiency 
and economy, on the one hand ; and the 
growth of intelligence, means of communi- 
cation, and organizing ability, on the other. 
If, under organizing ability, we include the 



236 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

capacity of a democracy to select wise leaders 
and to maintain an effective oversight on the 
actions of these, then it may be said that the 
degree to which centralization at any time may 
proceed must be the resultant of the two fac- 
tors mentioned above. 

Centralized administration of public educa- 
tion may have, at any given period, some good 
and some bad effects. Other things remaining 
equal, it promotes efficiency in the following 
directions : — 

(a) It develops uniformity over large areas, 
with the accompanying possibilities of econ- 
omy. Types of educational effort may be co- 
ordinated, official bodies reduced, conflicting 
jurisdiction adjusted, and the material means 
of instruction provided on a large scale. 

(b) It permits the collective wisdom of the 
larger area to control the actions of the smaller, 
to maintain at least a minimum level of cultural 
uniformity, and thus to prevent local develop- 
ments hostile to the best interests of the State. 
The State may determine the minimum amount 
of money to be given locally to public educa- 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 237 

tion ; it may aid weaker localities ; it may in- 
spect the results of local educational effort; 
and it may enforce the establishment of new 
types of education; in a similar way, the 
county as opposed to the smaller areas, or the 
city as opposed to its divisions, may enforce 
conditions of efficiency better than the more 
minute divisions. 

(c) It makes possible the substitution of 
carefully-planned and coordinated policies for 
the vagaries and immature schemes of purely 
local administration with its popular control 
and inexpert management. A large city, or 
county, or other area, or the State, in inaugu- 
rating new policies may have specialists plan- 
ning the work even for years before the first 
step is taken. Information from various sources 
may be collected, and experiments conducted, 
before the promulgation of a new policy. 

(d) Finally, centralized administration makes 
possible the introduction and development of 
the expert. Undoubtedly this is its most im- 
portant contribution to efficiency. In propor- 
tion as the primitive art of educational admin- 



238 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

istration becomes complex and is transformed 
into a field of applied science, the presence of 
specially qualified experts becomes indispen- 
sable. But the development of the expert 
seems to be possible only in divisions large 
either in area or population and under condi- 
tions of control which are not purely demo- 
cratic as democracy was understood in the 
primitive life of America. Among the types 
of expert service already past the experimental 
stage of development in American education 
may be mentioned the architect, to plan and 
supervise the erection of school buildings ; the 
man who is at once physician and educator, to 
direct various aspects of physical education, 
such as medical inspection, physical training, 
and to supervise the hygienic conditions of in- 
struction ; the business manager, to attend to 
the financial affairs of the school system ; the 
statistician, who directs the making of school 
records and reports, and who is able to utilize 
these so as to derive conclusions suggestive of 
new administrative procedures ; the specialized 
supervisor of instruction, whether of some 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 239 

division of the educational system, as kinder- 
gartens, rural schools, grammar grades so- 
called, or high school, or of instruction in 
some type of subject-matter, such as music or 
manual arts ; or, finally, the superintendent, 
the earliest of the experts to be developed, 
and the man who must yet stand at the head 
of any system, expressing its most genuine de- 
mands and coordinating the various aspects of 
its activities in the interest, first, of the indi- 
vidual child, and, second, in the final welfare 
of the State. 

Not only have the most successful attempts 
at centralization thus far made possible the 
utilization of these experts ; they create in 
turn new fields of leadership for which we 
may soon expect able men and women to pre- 
pare themselves. American education is rap- 
idly developing the profession of superintend- 
ent of schools, an office which has no exact 
counterpart elsewhere, but which must become 
indispensable to educational progress. Other 
types of specialized experts must soon be pro- 
vided. The development of physical education 



240 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

in the broad sense of that word must give us 
yet the man who is physician and educator 
combined ; the direction of vocational educa- 
tion will require experts who can devote their 
lives and a long period of training to this 
work ; and some day we must produce leaders 
who can strike out plans for moral or social 
training and superintend their execution. It is 
in evidence that educational finances, school 
architecture, the selection of textbooks, the 
education of defectives and delinquents, and 
the adjustment of children to practical life 
through employment bureaus will all in turn 
demand their experts. These are all conditions 
of true educational efficiency; and their de- 
velopment through and under experts requires 
an increasing centralized administration of 
public education. 

On the other hand, certain evils tend to 
follow in the train of centralized administra- 
tion of public education. The most conspicu- 
ous of these are : — 

(a) Lack of adaptability. Communities vary 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 241 

in their characteristics, needs, and ability to 
support varying forms of public schools. One 
portion of a city may differ from another, 
rural areas ma}^ differ from urban areas, and 
districts populated by foreigners may present 
special needs. Uniform schemes administered 
by central authorities fail in flexibility, and 
become mechanical. Until we know much 
better than we now do the genuine aims of 
public education, uniform schemes may work 
marked harm through failure to meet local 
needs. This evil is not, of course, an inherent 
one in centralized administration, since expert 
direction may eventually produce flexibility, 
if there is intelligent local demand for it; but 
it is a usual accompaniment. 

(b) Akin to this unwelcome result is the 
waning of popular interest. Localized and pop- 
ular administration of education has produced 
in all sections of America a more intense pub- 
lic interest and activity than has any other 
form of social action. Some forms of political 
activity may thrive and develop without pop- 
ular interest; not so public education. The 



242 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

best of school education must blend inti- 
mately with home and community interests ; 
the absence or withdrawal of this cooperation 
chills and mechanizes school agencies. Much 
of the effectiveness of American education 
has been realized, in spite of its imperfect 
administration, largely owing to the popular 
devotion to its ideals and processes. In the 
face of centralizing tendencies it is hard 
to keep alive local interest; for the most 
genuine form comes only when the imme- 
diate community has enough control of the 
administrative machinery to make its will 
felt. 

(c) Equally serious is the effect of central- 
ization in diminishing possibilities for varia- 
tion and experiment. President Butler has 
declared that spontaneity is the characteris- 
tic feature of American education. Not only 
has the public school itself been indigenous to 
each State, but to a large extent all the special 
features of public education have had a local 
and spontaneous development. Within each 
State communities have vied with each other, 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 243 

have embarked upon experiments, have devel- 
oped and fixed variations in new directions. 
Speaking in biological terms the variability 
of American education has been enormous, 
which, considering the conditions, has resulted 
in much progress. Ultimately society will reach 
the point where, as now in the case of medi- 
cine, it will support conscious experimentation 
on a large scale in education, but until then, 
we can hardly afford to surrender the oppor- 
tunities, however crude and wasteful, which 
exist in a decentralized form of educational 
administration, especially when the spirit of 
experimentation and competition still prevails. 
Lack of variability as in the case of adapta- 
bility is not an inherent evil of centralized 
administration, but a probable tendency in the 
pre-scientific stages in which public education 
still exists. 

(d) Finally, we have to note that adminis- 
trative centralization tends to entail the evils 
of bureaucracy, and not less when it is in 
charge of experts with more or less perma- 
nent tenure. These experts must inevitably 



244 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

tend towards group solidarity, having kindred 
sentiments and interests, both in pursuit of 
social satisfaction and while endeavoring to 
accomplish mutual improvement. The rela- 
tions of the experts towards the public tend to 
become official and formal. In time, a bureau- 
cracy may be formed, with distinctively anti- 
social tendencies. 

We have now described in somewhat ex- 
treme contrast the desirable and undesirable 
effects of the centralized administration to- 
wards which our American public school sys- 
tems are, with occasional exceptions, steadily 
tending. There remain for consideration the 
means by which some adjustments between 
local and popular administration, on the one 
hand, and centralized and expert administra- 
tion, on the other, can be effected so as to 
produce the maximum of social good. Many 
such adjustments have already been made in 
an empiric fashion, and many more are theo- 
retically feasible. The evolution of English 
government, as Lowell indicates at numerous 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 245 

points, 1 has produced a variety of means of 
combining local and central control so as to 
minimize the evil effects of each. The Educa- 
tion Bill of 1902, among other recent admin- 
istrative measures in public education, brings 
into action a number of devices to produce 
the same effect. But in most of the American 
States it can hardly be said that policies of 
adjustment have reached the plane of political 
consciousness, notwithstanding the fact that 
in most State legislatures there is at each ses- 
sion an almost constant struggle between the 
opponents and proponents of measures making 
in turn for centralization or decentralization. 
Too often the contest is for the preservation 
of some purely local function or for its com- 
plete centralization ; not enough do legislators 
seek constructive measures in the middle 
ground. But it is possible, through an exami- 
nation of the results obtained in some States, 
and on the basis of some European experi- 
ence, to suggest means of adjustment. Among 
these are the following : — 

1 A. Lawrence Lowell. The Government of England, 
2 vols., The Macmillan Company, 1908. 



246 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

I. The complete exercise of a given func- 
tion may be divided between two agencies, 
one of which represents the relatively expert 
and centralized aspect of administration, the 
other the more democratic and local. Accord- 
ing to conditions the initiative will lie with 
the one or the other of these agencies. 

The following are the principal situations 
involved in educational administration : — 

(a) The division of power between expert 
and lay officials. This is already found in a 
State like New York in which a lay board 
acts through an expert commissioner of edu- 
cation ; in those forms of county government 
found especially in Southern States and in 
Indiana in which a lay board elects and oper- 
ates through an expert county superintend- 
ent ; and especially in cities in which the lay 
boards have gradually ceased to exercise ad- 
ministrative functions, but hold themselves 
responsible for general legislation and for 
final approval or veto of the acts of the ex- 
pert superintendent. By law in the State of 
Ohio and by local provision in the cities of 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 247 

many other States, boards of education have, 
after many years of hesitation, given to the 
superintendent the supreme function of the 
expert, which is the nomination of those who 
are to teach or otherwise work in the schools ; 
in these cases the boards reserve only the 
right of final veto or approval on the nomi- 
nations of the superintendent. It is needless 
here to point out that such a division of 
power as this serves largely as a corrective to 
various of the possible evils of centralization 
discussed above. Giving large powers to the 
expert, it yet reserves a form of final control 
to the public and its lay representatives. Such 
a conscious division of powers is not yet 
widely found in practice in American States- 
The State and county superintendents, who 
should be experts, are in too many instances 
chosen by popular election for definite terms 
and are responsible only to the public, all of 
which conditions preclude the development 
of the real expert. In some cases State and 
county boards are really composed of experts, 
but are only partially allocated to the per- 



248 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

formance of expert functions. American cities 
show this division of administrative powers at 
its best. 

(b) A second form of divided administra- 
tive power is found in that which is practicable 
between the more central and the more local 
agencies, whether these be expert or lay. Illus- 
trations of this are found where the legislature 
fixes by statute maxima and minima of taxa- 
tion, leaving to local communities considerable 
local option ; or under a minimum salary law 
which allows the local area to exercise its own 
option in exceeding the maximum; or where 
State or other central approval is required for 
plans of buildings locally drawn ; or in the 
existence of State courses of study which may 
or may not be locally adopted ; but especially 
in the widespread tendency of State prescrip- 
tion of general features of courses, with op- 
portunity for fixing the details locally. A 
striking development of this form of offset to 
centralization is found in England in which 
the National Board of Education suggests to 
local authorities a large number of alternatives 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 249 

in many aspects of local administration, leav- 
ing to local authorities responsibility for pro- 
posing definite plans and specifications. These 
in turn must be approved by the higher au- 
thorities before they can become effective. 
The possibilities of a further development of 
this division of administrative power in Amer- 
ican States is great, especially where central- 
ized administration tends to become too uni- 
form and incapable of allowing for healthful 
variation. There is no inherent reason why, 
for example, the adoption of a State system 
of textbooks should mean absolute State uni- 
formity. The State might adopt two or more 
of the best texts and allow for local choice 
among these ; or it might adopt a single list 
for all except those communities which could 
present good reasons for adopting some other 
series, which reasons could be approved or 
negatived by the State authorities. There is 
inherently no good reason why a course of 
study should be uniform throughout a large 
city, except as to its most general features. 
Probably much greater opportunity for prog- 



250 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

ress and local adaptation would be found if 
large schools were each able, within the limits 
of a very general and minimum course, to 
make proposals as to details, which should re- 
ceive the refusal or endorsement of the central 
city authorities. It is not impossible that as 
the demands for a richer corporate life within 
the school increase, the head of the school 
will be given much greater authority than he 
is now able to exercise in the choice of his 
assistants. " But the evidence before the com- 
mittee points to the conclusion that, in the 
selection of their assistants, the head teachers 
of our public elementary schools should as a 
rule be allowed to have a more effective voice 
than is now granted to them," says Dr. Sadler 
in writing the introduction to the recent In- 
ternational Inquiry on Moral Instruction 
and Training in the Schools. The State might 
very well impose on the local community the 
obligation to support certain amounts or kinds 
of vocational education, but leave to the lo- 
cality option as to the details, subject to in- 
spection. On the other hand, it is probable 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 251 

that in many States functions now locally ex- 
ercised exclusively might well be shared with 
State or higher authorities, as is done to some 
extent in the certification of teachers. For 
example, local budgets, salary schedules, and 
pension schemes might all be made to require 
approval of higher authorities before final 
adoption. It can safely be said that centralized 
administration through division of responsi- 
bility between central and local authorities has 
had little more than preliminary development 
in American education. In the future develop- 
ments of professional training of teachers after 
entering on service, in the development of 
professional oversight of the physical aspects 
of education, and in provision of moral or 
civic training, it is entirely possible that the 
State or other large area must assume increas- 
ing responsibility, but it is evident that the 
social effectiveness of this will depend upon a 
proper division of responsibility between local 
and central authorities. 

II. Another system of correctives to cen- 
tralization is that to be found in the existence 



252 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

of bodies which, in the exercise of more or 
less localized functions, reflect public opinion, 
inform official and centralized agencies, and 
in turn, through the exercise of these powers, 
are themselves enlightened and have their 
appreciation of the general system of admin- 
istration enhanced. For practical purposes we 
may distinguish two types of effort in this 
direction : that which involves laymen whose 
attitude towards the schools is that mainly of 
the public supporting the schools and inter- 
ested mainly in the output ; and the relatively 
minor officials in the system itself who are in 
most intimate touch with the practical prob- 
lems. 

(a) State commissions, citizens' unions, 
parents' associations, public education author- 
ities of one kind and another have been or- 
ganized at times to study public education, to 
contribute to it moral support, and by criti- 
cism, destructive and constructive, to improve 
it. Vastly more extensive is the informal co- 
operation and criticism which emanates from 
commercial and religious organizations, from 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 253 

political parties, and from groups of people 
expressing more or less coherent public opin- 
ion. In the rudimentary stages of the evolu- 
tion of educational administration, the last 
agencies described are quite ample to produce 
needed intimacy between the public and the 
schools ; but as administration becomes more 
complex and highly and even sensitively or- 
ganized, these crude agencies are not only 
often unserviceable, but not infrequently posi- 
tively harmful. Hence the need (since the 
social necessity which brings forth these forms 
of expression continues and grows) that or- 
ganized channels for the accomplishment of 
these purposes be fostered. Not only should 
the organization of large and small bodies of 
laymen to study and criticize the public schools 
be encouraged, but regular means of com- 
munication for them should be provided, and 
when they reach the point of constructive 
recommendation their findings should invari- 
ably receive courteous treatment. This will 
not always be easy, for in proportion as ad- 
ministration becomes complex will it prove 



254 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

difficult to cause the layman to be well in- 
formed ; and the necessary effort to accomplish 
this can only be justified on the ground that 
in the long run the resulting cooperation is 
indispensable to an educational administra- 
tion that combines efficiency and sensitiveness 
to public opinion. 

(b) In any centralized system there are large 
numbers of head masters, teachers, and other 
minor officials who are in their degree experts 
and who are closely in touch with practical 
problems. Like the lay public, these also have 
their special and local interests in education, 
and not infrequently they have the same in- 
ability to comprehend the larger aspects of the 
problems involved. But their sympathetic un- 
derstanding, their disposition to cooperate, and 
especially their knowledge founded on prac- 
tical acquaintance with problems is essential 
to the wider administration. One of the early 
effects of centralization, however, is largely to 
silence this body. Frequently a measure of 
suppression is thought necessary from the 
standpoint of the morale or discipline of the 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 255 

force. Not infrequently autocratic ideas, bor- 
rowed from militaristic regimes, provide easy 
assent to measures taken to render the "force " 
orderly. And here again it must be confessed 
there is often great provocation. The theo- 
rizer, the sciolist, the chronic critic, are found 
too frequently in the body of teachers and 
other minor officials. Much freedom allowed 
to these does tend to demoralization of the 
teaching force, temporarily at least. But it is 
evident that a wise system of administration 
should prove abundantly able to draw on the 
vast resources of experience available in the 
ranks, and especially to stimulate the self- 
activity which results from the exercise of 
legitimate freedom, without having chaos and 
disorder result. That form of administration, 
for example, whether of State, county, or city, 
which utilizes to a large extent committees 
and associations either already formed or cre- 
ated for this purpose, as means of investiga- 
tion, criticism, suggestion, and constructive 
action, is surely most effective in the long run. 
Examples of this kind of cooperation are 



256 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

readily available, even though in many school 
systems no regular policy has yet been devel- 
oped of providing it for a variety of situations. 
State, divisional, county, and city associations 
of teachers make recommendations as to legis- 
lation and occasionally as to administration ; 
in the formulation of courses of study, com- 
mittees of teachers or principals are formed to 
confer and make recommendations; in the 
selection of textbooks, State or more local 
boards have often constituted committees to 
examine books and make tentative recom- 
mendations. In a few cases committees of 
teachers have been asked to assist examining 
boards in preparing questions for teachers' 
and pupils' examinations. Recent tendencies 
of colleges to enlist the cooperation of second- 
ary school teachers in preparing tests for ad- 
mission to college is another instance of the 
same tendency. 

It will, of course, be recognized that the 
communication and cooperation described 
above exist constantly in an unorganized form 
in most school systems ; but the fact here to 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 257 

be emphasized is that in a complex system of 
administration it is no longer sufficient to de- 
pend upon casual and unorganized efforts in 
this direction. So important is the interaction 
of the various forces of administration that as 
systems become unwieldy and relationships 
less intimate and personal, in that proportion 
is it necessary to organize and set in motion 
machinery which will systematically effect the 
same result. This principle has already ob- 
tained recognition in the conduct of large 
business affairs ; owing to the sensitive and 
personal character of public education, the 
need for such mutual interaction here is much 
greater. 

In view, then, of the rapid and to a large 
extent necessary centralization which is every- 
where taking place in educational administra- 
tion, it would seem that educators should, as 
far as practicable, recognize and give effect to 
principles like the following : — 

1. The evolution of administration should 
be along such lines as to secure the selection 



258 EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

and retention of a genuine expert at the head 
of each important administrative function. 
This principle is widely observed now, espe- 
cially in municipal school administration, but 
theglaring exceptions are the popularly elected 
and therefore largely inexpert county and 
State superintendents of public instruction in 
the majority of the States. 

2. Back of the expert, and in ultimate but 
guarded authority over him, should be a com- 
mittee or board representing the public and 
as immediately responsible to the public as 
possible. Such boards should be restricted as 
regards administrative initiative and recom- 
mendation, but their general powers of veto 
and approval should be large. In many cases 
State boards of education are at present not 
of this character; and the majority of city and 
other school boards do not yet concede to the 
expert the powers of initiation and recom- 
mendation here implied. 

3. Administrative policy should seek a con- 
sistent division of functions between local and 
central administrative agencies to the end that 



ADMINISTRATION OF EDUCATION 259 

flexibility, variation, and mutual understand- 
ing may result. The examples of this at pres- 
ent are few and irregular. 

4. Lay agencies and commissions tempo- 
rary or permanent should be developed widely 
to represent local sentiment, to study adminis- 
tration, and finally to express public opinion. 
These now exist to some extent, but they are 
sporadic in character and receive little sys- 
tematic encouragement from administrative 
authorities. 

5. Similarly, bodies small and large should 
be freely created or encouraged among the 
rank and file of the lower officials of the force 
of experts for the purpose of being charged 
with a measure of responsibility for reflection 
of local expert sentiment, for study of prob- 
lems, and for final recommendations. These 
bodies now occasionally exist, but no system- 
atic policy has been adopted with reference 
to their organization and functioning. 



INDEX 



Administration , educational , 233. 
Agriculture, 114. 
Appreciation, education for, 163. 

Butler, President, 242. 

Centralized administration of 
education, 233. 

Citizenship, education for, 75, 
103. 

Civic education, 91. 

College education, 67. 

College preparatory studies, 155, 
162, 177. 

Commercial subjects in upper 
grades, 143. 

Cooperative education, 225, 

Cooperative vocational educa- 
tion, 205. 

Correlation in practical arts, 123. 

Custom in education, 24. 

Democracy and education, 20. 
Democracy, education for, 88. 
Departmental teaching, 144. 
Differentiation in upper grade 

work, 130. 
Division of administrative power, 

246,248. 

Education, new, 1. 
Education for utilization, 69. 
Educational administration, 27. 
Educational flexibility, 21. 
Educational readjustment, 7. 
Efficiency in educational ad- 
ministration, 236. 



Elementary education, 130. 

Elementary school, manual train- 
ing in, 114. 

English expression, 171. 

Evening vocational education, 
207. 

Executive ability, education for, 
164. 

Expert in education, 239. 

Expert service, 28. 

Fitchburg, Mass., 144. 
Flexibility of elementary curric- 
ulum, 137. 
Foreign language, 139. 
French public schools, 111. 

High School, maladjustment in, 

133 ; two years' course in, 148 ; 

increased attendance in, 134 ; 

program for, 168. 
High schools, small, 154. 
History as social science, 173. 
History in elementary schools, 

108. 
History, study of, 88 ; scientific 

treatment of, 100. 
Household arts, 114. 
Humanities, 76. 

Instinct of teaching, 27. 
Intermediate high school, 

145. 
Intermediate schools, 143. 

Language, foreign, 179. 
Liberal education, 65, 160, 163 ; 



262 



INDEX 



program of, 81 ; practical arts 
in, 113; denned, 115. 

Liberal and vocational educa- 
tion, 185. 

Literature, English, 169. 

Localized administration of edu- 
cation, 233. 

Logical order in studies, 48, 119. 

Logical organization of subject- 
matter, 35. 

Lowell, A. Lawence, 245 (foot- 
note). 

Manual training, 113. 

Manufacturing industries, voca- 
tional education for, 193. 

Mathematics, 77. 

Memorization, 25. 

Method, 33 ; hasis of, 54 ; in vo- 
cational education, 227- 

Methods of teaching, 23. 

" Natural " learning, 39, 48. 
" Natural " learning capacities, 

165. 
Nietzsche, cited, 101. 

Part-time vocational education, 

205, 224. 
Pedagogical order, 43, 119. 
Pedagogic order in vocational 

education, 220. 
Practical arts, 113, 140, 152 ; in 

small high schools, 161 ; in 

high schools, 175. 
Practical work in vocational 

education, 216. 
Primary teaching, 44. 
Primary grades, success of, 130. 
Productive work in vocational 

education, 188. 
Professional education, 213. 



Program of studies, congestion 
of, 138. 

" Projects " in practical arts, 
125. 

Psychology of vocational educa- 
tion, 211. 

Public school, scope of, 11. 

Retardation, 132, 146. 
Robinson, J. H., 112. 
Russell, Dean, ref., 119. 

Sadler, Dr., ref., 250. 

Schools, intermediate, 143. 

Science, 78 ; general, 172 ; so- 
cial, 173. 

Social economy, 9. 

Social instincts, 104. 

Social science, 173. 

Specialized occupations, educa- 
tion for, 195. 

State control of education, 
105. 

Teachers' organization, 254. 
Technical studies in vocational 

education, 218. 
Thorndyke, Dr., 154. 

" Unit " of learning, 61. 

Variability in education, 243. 

Vocational education, 65 ; de- 
fined, 115 ; in small high 
schools, 175 ; issues in, 183; 
accepted principles regarding, 
187 ; for what callings, 192 ; 
for persons from 14 to 16, 
196, 221 ; productive work in, 
201 ; psychology, of 211 ; in the 
Middle Ages, 213. 

Voluntary organizations, 251. 



JUL 2 191a 



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